High times
Stephen Fry, a multiply gifted British harlequin who appears to be as starstruck as he is enamored of his own celebrity, once asked his friend William Goldman to describe what Robert Redford was really like. “Well,” replied the screenwriter of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “tell me what you would be like if for twenty-five years you had never heard the word ‘no.’ ”
One might offer that Fry, an actor/writer/wit-of-all-trades who has rarely gone begging for occupation since his fledgling Cambridge Players days with cohorts Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, has suffered the converse of the Redford syndrome: He’s just a guy who can’t say “no.” To judge from his precious new autobiography, “More Fool Me,” Fry (or at least the Fry of his “Jeeves and Wooster” heyday) has seldom encountered a flattering role, club membership, screenplay opportunity, lecture gig, movie premiere, A-list dinner party, glass of Armagnac or, in the book’s baldest revelation, line of coke that he had the heart to turn down.
While we’re inventorying Fry’s favorite things, we should add book deals. In addition to four novels and sundry collections of what he might categorize as “a salmagundi of writings,” this new volume marks Fry’s third foray into memoir territory: an act of “inexcusable hubris,” by his own typically self-deprecating admission. And given that “More Fool Me” only reaches as far as the actor’s woolly 30s, there is every chance that he will be able to match, if not surpass, the seven memoirs generated by the late British screen star Dirk Bogarde.
Where Bogarde (compelled by the punitive anti-homosexual laws of the day) managed to keep his private life under wraps throughout that forest of personal anecdote, however, Fry has suffered no inhibitions in discussing his samesex orientation, to which, along with his Jewish lineage, he attributes his self-identifi- cation as an outsider and transgressor.
And transgress he did, although anyone hoping for a waning-20th-century bacchanalia of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll will emerge only partially gratified. But for an epistolary come-on by a brassy young admirer (which may or may not have been consummated), “More Fool Me” delivers scant sex and scarce rock. Two members of Blur make a cameo appearance.
Drugs, on the other hand, hold center ring. In lieu of romantic liaisons, which pass unmentioned, Fry had promiscuous relationships with countless grams of cocaine over the course of some 15 years. Moreover, he was as centered and sanguine in his dependency as a cokehead could hope to be. “I didn’t take coke because I was depressed or under pressure,” he owns. “I took it because I really, really liked it.”
Fry’s unfettered ardor for his former stimulant of choice, which he capriciously calls “Bolivian Marching Powder,” inspires an awkward foxtrot of equivocation in the vein of, well, “I had a fabulous ride, but, please, don’t go there.” If Fry makes any apologies, it is to the innumerable institutions whose lavatories he befouled to feed his habit, which include Buckingham Palace; Windsor Castle; the House of Commons; the Hotels Dorchester, Connaught and Savoy; and multifarious gentlemen’s clubs of high repute.
It is a measure of the actor’s self-confirmed obsession with belonging that he precedes his confessional by listing these exclusive establishments over two full pages, as if to say, I may be debauched, dear reader, but boy, have I arrived. This tightrope walk between humility and braggadocio reaches its vertiginous apex when he quotes the nosubstance clause of a club rule book that he also authored: Not only does Fry break the rules, he gets to write the rules that he breaks.
Still, who else but an addict with the chops to pull off a flawless Malvolio opposite Mark Rylance’s Olivia could transmit the essence of a cocaine high with a Shakespearean quote? Fry writes with the knowingly dithering tone of a professor trying to seduce his class with an air of affected distraction. Occasionally his inner pedagogue gets the better of him (he admonishes the ignorant who spell “restaurateur” with an n), and his inner press agent gets a little pushy (count the plugs for his other books). The twee factor in “More Fool Me” is as dangerously high as the cocaine use, rendering it safe for use primarily by Fry’s habituated acolytes and fans of that “preposterous nobby British tradition” enshrined with loyalist reverence by the Public Broadcasting System.