Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  When the adventurers of the past, the gold diggers, first decided to go west to the promised land/the general idea was to find the motherlode. Things change: the descendants of these explorers still share this frantic/greed, but it has turned into an indecent obsession with the mirage of fame. They are given over to it hearts and minds/body and soul/flesh and blood. Los Angeles is not of this earth; it’s a boom town for dreams that money can

  buy. Everyone believes with the burning frenzy of the moonstruck that they too can make a splash and become a giant/legend, if only fortune deigns to smile. The conversation you pick up from the starstruck lounge lizard and the beguiled/barfly always revolves around hitting the big time (2) or the struggle of keeping up the desperate mask of pretence that they have already jumped on the bandwagon of easy money and easy living. Family life, security, every normal impulse is sacrificed one by one in this ruthless quest for miracles.

  It’s not a safe place; the crazies and ruthless people who run it show no mercy, they hire and fire with caprice and in cold blood. They hold nothing sacred but the sweet smell of success. The verdict of future generations will probably be harsh. I could go on singing the dispraises of Los Angeles for ever, but I’m on dangerous ground because, bananas as it may sound, I love this magic town.

  I forget who first exposed the natural truth that if you look hard enough beneath the surface tinsel of Hollywood you find … more tinsel, but he overlooked the city’s saving grace. In the end, the real genius of Hollywood is that the tinsel is perfect tinsel. The producers at work in the glitter dome may only turn out trash, but it’s model trash. They have turned alchemy inside out and discovered the formula for the most important of secrets: taking real gold, dull and useless as it is, and transforming it into the shining dross that millions like us need: the stuff of dreams.

  Piles

  Round about the middle of the last decade, when Peter York’s phrase ‘Sloane Ranger’ still held sway over the multitudes, the car to be seen in was the Volkswagen Golf GTI. I remember a friend of mine who was Sloaner than the Square itself seeing one parked outside his house. He had sold his own cabriolet version the moment he noticed they were becoming fashionable, such is the game these types play. He looked with contempt at the model that was cluttering up his leafy Brompton avenue and said, ‘I hate those ruddy cars. Piles, I call them.’ ‘Piles?’ I enquired. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later every arsehole gets them.’

  Not the finest joke in the world, and almost certainly not original. Nonetheless this remark set me thinking, for I myself had succumbed to my first attack of haemorrhoids that week and they were much on my mind, well, much on another part of my exquisitely proportioned self, of course, but you know what I mean. By the kind of perfectly probable and predictable synchronicity which deluded Arthur Koestler into wasting his time on developing a theory of coincidences, it so fell out that a fortnight after this event my agent was holding a houseparty in Essex. He was a marvellous man, since gathered to God, it grieves me to say, but very much the last of a breed. I remember him as a sort of flurry of cigar, Bentley and Old Etonian tie, with the aspect of a rather cross owl who has just washed his feathers and can’t do a thing with them. His obsession, in his later years, was to bring people out on the subject of piles. The particular evening I am recalling was rather formal, possibly it was St Vedast’s Day, and the dinner had ended with the women leaving the table and the men clustering around the host’s end trying to remember port etiquette.

  As soon as the last female had departed this splendid man rapped the board with the decanter and said, ‘Now. With how many here have I had my Piles Conversation?’ The confused silence that followed this unusual question revealed that we were all innocent of any such ennobling experience. For the next few hours (until, that is, the hostess had coughed loudly outside the door for the seventeenth time) we proceeded to enact The Piles Conversation, the transcript of which would be fit only for a dedicated journal of proctology or a medical student’s rag mag.

  The gist, nub, burden, gravamen or thrust of the Conversation was that all men suffer from piles, the same truth upon which the Golf Gti joke depended. Certainly the ten or so men in that room were all chronic sufferers. I use the word chronic in its medical sense here. Freed by our host’s brave introductory confessions and flushed with a fine vintage of the Portuguese, out tumbled tales from all of us. What chequered careers our bottoms had all had! Perineal abscesses and haematomas as well as the common domestic haemorrhoid. This was a Damascan Road conversion for me; the scales, as it were, fell from my eyes.

  The knowledge that one is not alone is priceless. We know from the poets that we are not alone when we are frustrated in ambition, crossed in love or dumb-struck by Dame Nature in her best designer-wear spring collection, but few poets have understood that we need to be consoled in our more banausic moods as well. Haldane, the great scientist, it is true, wrote a splendid poem about rectal carcinoma, but that is a rarer condition. There was a graffito reportedly scrawled on the lavatory at the Earl of Leicester’s Norfolk seat (as it were) which is attributed to Byron.

  O Cloacina, goddess of this place,

  Look on thy suppliants with smiling face.

  Smooth and consistent may their offerings flow;

  Neither rashly swift, nor insolently slow.

  Only Byron, I think, would describe constipation as insolence. But one has to look all the way back to the epigrammatists of the Greek Anthology to find any comparable poetic consolation.

  We are constantly told, or constantly tell ourselves, that we are obsessed by things lavatorial. I beg leave to doubt it. We believe that picturing this politician or that great financier on the lavatory will somehow drain them of their power over us. But this reveals a shame more than an obsession.

  In an attempt, therefore, to rid our society of its fundamental pudeur, I would urge all those of you with unwell bottoms to raise them over dinner. You will be doing a great public service. In less than a year all sorts and conditions of men and women will be freed of one area at least of acute social embarrassment. The costive of open conversation can purge us of this and all our ills.

  Pass the doughnut-shaped cushion, Alice.

  A Friendly Voice in the Polo Lounge

  Whose is the last voice you would expect to hear drifting over to your table if you were dining alone in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel?

  The Polo Lounge is celebrated in legend, song and paperback novel as the place where people go to be seen. The thing to do is to get yourself paged. ‘Telephone call for Herb Buckleman. Herb Buckleman to the telephone please.’ These words will ring out from time to time as you sip your Long Island iced tea or crack your Dungeness crabs. It seems that important producers and powerful executives will be mightily impressed to know that Herb Buckleman is somehow, somewhere Wanted. Suddenly Herb Buckleman becomes an interesting person: just the man we are looking for, in fact, to write the seventh draft of that new Schwarzenegger movie.

  This bizarre concept leads to the improbable phenomenon of people paging themselves in the Polo Lounge, or by the pool. They nip round to a telephone booth, ring the operator of the hotel with a message for themselves to call a certain number at once, and then streak back poolside or to the Polo Lounge in time to receive their message. To create an even more favourable impression it is common to give yourself an alias. Thus: ‘Will Herb Buckleman, using the name Jerome Lassinger, please contact the operator urgently.’ Herb Buckleman is now established as so important that he has to stay at the Beverly Hills under an assumed name, so as to keep the world’s media off his back.

  As you might expect, this creates a kind of backlash. So well known is the self-paging procedure, that should anyone be summoned to the telephone it is now assumed they have arranged it themselves and are therefore sad, desperate individuals best avoided.

  The atmosphere in the Polo Lounge is therefore fraught with tension. I was dining there last night, all of a doo-dah becaus
e irresponsible friends back home had threatened to have me paged once every ten minutes, an ignominy I didn’t think I could face. This fear made it very difficult to peep through my fingers at Eddie Murphy and Michael Douglas and generally enjoy the fun of being in such a place at such a time. Fortunately my friends did not ring; mostly, I think, because half past seven in Los Angeles is half past three in the morning in England and even the most dedicated ruiner of people’s lives needs sleep.

  I moved thankfully therefore from the cocktail area of the Polo Lounge into the dining area, ordered a warm tenderloin chicken salad and whipped out a paperback. It is strange to imagine that chickens have loins and that they are substantial enough for their tenderness to be determined; I think the name is in fact part of that amiable American preference for tough, pioneering names for their food. We are satisfied with French as the language of cooking but Americans find it a little sissy. I think they have a point: ‘Seared belly of Nebraska hog, with sourdough and cracked Maine lobster claws’ does sound more manly and more appetising than, say, noisettes d’agneau à la Grecque dans un coulis de pamplemousse.

  There I was, cosily and blissfully wrapped in my own world – for dining alone is surely one of the most exquisite pleasures the world has to offer – when a familiar voice, not English, drifted over to my table. A voice more familiar to my generation than almost any other. The voice of a man who has regularly presented his own television programme for twenty-five years, a man who has had many top ten records in England; a man who has been as affectionately mocked and persistently imitated as anyone during that time. For all that, the last voice I would ever have expected to hear in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  It was the voice of Rolf Harris. Quite why his voice should be so incongruous in this setting, I do not know, but a healing wave of homesickness swept over me like a moist mountain wind. I forgot America and its billion-dollar entertainment industry, its strangely named foodstuffs and its recondite hotel etiquette. Rolf Harris was there and suddenly I knew I was English and could never be anything else.

  For all that our influence abroad has dwindled to Aston Martins and Mrs Thatcher’s hats, the magnetic power of home has a pull with which dollars and avocado salads cannot compete. When you’re wandering lost in Patagonia the sight of a battered packet of Scott’s Porage Oats in a small tienda can tug at your heart strings like nothing else. When you’re alone in the Polo Lounge, the fluting tones of Australia’s greatest son beckon you home like a lighthouse.

  The moment Rolf Harris’s wonderful bass baritone voice penetrated my ear, I rose from my seat, hurried to reception and had him paged. It was the least I could do.

  Drawing up a Hate List

  There was a very silly joke people used to tell in the unreconstructed sixties, around the time when the fruits of the Wolfenden Report were being born, which concerned a Geordie who had visited Australia House, received all the necessary jabs from his doctor, packed up his belongings and sold his house preparatory to making a new life in the Southern Hemisphere. At the airport a reporter is interviewing him and asking why he has decided to give up the old country.

  ‘Well,’ says the Geordie, ‘two hundred years ago homosexuality was punishable by death in this country. A hundred years later the sentence was two years’ hard labour. Fifty years ago it was six months’ imprisonment. Now it’s legal. I’m getting out before they make it compulsory.’

  Not a salubrious joke, nor frankly an enlightening or enlightened; still less an amusing. There is value, however, in reflecting on what changes could be wrought in one’s country which would force one to consider leaving. The usual motives for emigration revolve around opportunity, taxes or familial plight, but is it possible to imagine legislation which would cause one to leave Britain, not for financial reasons, but out of disgust?

  I was thinking about this earlier in the week, because I have long promised myself that if ever capital punishment was reintroduced here I should have, regretfully (on my part at least), to fold my tents and steal silently into the night. I mean, how too embarrassing it would be to belong to a country that went round putting its subjects to death. How could a fellow hold up his head with any pride as an Englishman if at the back of the mind was the thought that part of his taxes were going towards the cost of rope that was designed to snap people’s necks? Simply too unthinkably shame-making. One just wouldn’t know where to look when in the company of persons from civilised countries.

  Of course the difficulty with such a drastic resolution, that of forswearing one’s homeland on a point of principle, is that it can appear so petulant and hysterical. Those who like the idea of hanging would regard my emigration as good riddance to bad pusillanimous rubbish. ‘If you can’t stand the heat then get out of the kitchen,’ would be the nub of their argument. To which I would reply, in that way I have, that I would much rather stay in the kitchen if someone would only be kind enough to turn the heat down, or possibly open the window and let in some fresh air. But democracy being democracy, an Act of Parliament that reintroduced the Death Penalty would hardly be stayed in its course because I, or any citizen, threatened to leave. One’s departure would be of no value therefore as a protest, nor as a stunt; it would be a pure act of preference: one would rather not live here any more.

  But perhaps this is simply cowardice. Wouldn’t a fellow of real principle stay and fight? Is it not better to hold one’s ground and campaign manfully than to flee and whinge feebly from the sidelines? I suppose this is true. But the return of the death penalty would cause such an overwhelming weight of weariness and revulsion to descend on me that all my fight would go. The same would happen if those weird anti-smoking fanatics got their way and managed to outlaw God’s honest cigarette or Nature’s healing cigar. I could try and justify my abhorrence and dread of Capital Punishment and Tobacco Prohibition by recourse to argument, but what separates them from other political or social issues in my case is, in fact, a deep and implacable hatred.

  I was in a play once where an actress used to cheer us up during the dull hours between matinée and evening performances by getting us all to compile what she called Hate Lists. Anonymously we would have to compile a list of ten things that we hated irrationally and irretrievably. It could be anything: brass bands, Oxford, Vauxhalls, Wales, vitamins, sherry-glasses, tennis, the novels of D.H. Lawrence … whatever sprang from the real depths of one’s soul. The lists would then be read out and we would have to guess who had written what.

  I would recommend this as a Christmas game, adding perhaps the listing of possible legislation that would force one to emigrate. Hatred might seem rather unseasonal, but the optimistic results of such an undertaking are that healthy players of the game (if they are really honest) never put people in their lists, even truly ghastly people; they only list things, attitudes and actions. This is because people are not capable of being evil, they are only capable of evil; that is the crucial difference that allows repentance and forgiveness, which, when all is said and done, is what Christmas is all about.

  The discovery that one cannot hate people, only what they do or what they say, is a profoundly important one. It is as good a note as I can think of on which to wish you all, as they used to say in those unreconstructed sixties, a Cool Yule and a Gear New Year.

  Blithe & Bonny & Good & Gay

  Like many of my discredited generation I am insanely in love with gadgetry of all descriptions. In that dread era of eighties conspicuous consumption, none consumed more conspicuously than I. Even though we are now firmly into the new age of gentle caring, I’m finding it hard to catch up. In moral terms it is as if I am still gelling my hair back and wearing Bass Weejuns (a thing no nineties child would der-ream of doing, as you know). Why, only yesterday I caught myself going into a shop in the Tottenham Court Road and buying a CDV player. You don’t know what a CDV player is? Shame on you. It’s a sort of CD player, only instead of playing just audio laser-discs it plays video, too. So now you can watch yo
ur favourite film with crystal clear freeze frames and digital sound. An important step, I’m sure you’ll agree.

  This means that my snuggarium, den, rumpus-cosy or room-in-which-all-my-equipment-is-kept as I crazily call it, now has five, almost identical, remote control hand-held thingummies in it. One for the television, one for the normal CD, one for the video cassette recorder, one for the CDV and one for the hi-fi. Come to think of it there are six, I forgot the one the burglars foolishly neglected to take when they abstracted my previous video-player. (Next time you’re passing, lads, you’ll find it on the occasional table near the window, under an angrily defaced edition of Halliwell’s Film Guide. I know how maddening it is not to have your hand-held, as it were.)

  Aside from this lone, selfless attempt to bring down John Major by prolonging the boom in foreign imports (for believe it or not Britain has no domestic CDV laser-disc player manufacturing industry of its own, which is in itself nothing short of a national scandal) and amassing electronic equipment of all kinds and uses, I enjoy collecting (as which newspaper columnist doesn’t) the latest, state-of-the-art catchphrases, slogans and buzzwords.

  I was there cheering when David Steel made a brave stab at introducing the word ‘overarching’ into the political vocabulary; there too when British Rail decided that ‘passengers’ were going to be called ‘customers’ and chuff-chuffs would be designated ‘services’; none squealed with greater delight than I when it was resolved that education and defence were sure to be the ‘hot button’ issues of the last election.

  Few of these phrases come, unsurprisingly perhaps, from Japan. We look to America for our brightest neologisms and euphemisms. On my last visit I leapt like a spawning salmon when, after having bought a ruinously expensive tie from a shop in Rodeo Drive, the not un-mimsy assistant winningly waved his little fingers and trilled by way of valediction, not the usual ‘goodbye’ or the more usual ‘Have a nice day, now’ but these immortal words: ‘Missing you already!’ Well, I mean, what? I mean what?