The Fry Chronicles Part 18

'Chou Lai's?' he asked. Everyone on board nodded.

After half an hour's chugging through choppy waters he was dropped off on an island. Nothing. He thought he had been (almost literally) shanghaied. After what seemed an eternity another junk phutted its way to the jetty.

'Chou Lai?' called the skipper, and once more my friend hopped aboard.

An hour followed in which he ploughed deeper through the South China Sea, beginning to fear for his life. At last he was deposited on yet another island, but this time there was at least a restaurant, strung with lights and vibrating with music. Chou Lai himself came forward, a bonh.o.m.ous fellow with an eyepatch that completed the superbly Condradian feel of my friend's adventure.

'h.e.l.lo, very welcome. Tell me, you American?'

'No, I'm English as a matter of fact.'

'Englis.h.!.+ Ah! You know P B-J?'

One wonders how many perplexed English customers had been asked that question without having the slightest idea who or what a 'P B-J' might be. My friend did know but doubted Chou Lai could possibly mean the same one. It turned out he certainly did.

'Yeah! Pe'er Be'ett-Joes!'

My friend had a free dinner and a ride back to Kowloon in Chou Lai's private launch.

There you have Peter Bennett-Jones: with his long lean frame, a line in crumpled linen suits and a ripely old-fas.h.i.+oned 'dear old boy' manner, he looks and sounds the part of a superannuated colonial district commissioner from the pages of Somerset Maugham, yet is younger than Mick Jagger and as sharp, clever and powerful a force in London's media world as you could find.

I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to miss the evening at the Zanzibar when Keith Allen, one of the pioneers of alternative comedy and a man I was to come to know well, stood up on the bar and began to throw bottles back and forth, destroying much of the stock as well as most of the mirrors and fittings. Keith did get arrested and on his return from a short stretch found himself permanently banned, or Zanzibarred as I preferred to put it. The owner, Tony Macintosh, was good-natured enough not to exclude him from his new establishment, the Groucho, which he and Mary-Lou Sturridge were on the point of opening in Soho.

My years of hurling myself headlong into the world of Soho Bohemia were still ahead of me, but I was beginning to look at figures like Keith Allen with a kind of admiration tinged with fear. They seemed to own the London in which I still felt like a shy visitor, a London which was beginning to vibrate with enormous energy. I was afraid to enter the fas.h.i.+onable nightclubs like the t.i.tanic and the Limelight; after all, they seemed to be about nothing but dancing and getting drunk, neither of which I was very interested in, and even the Zanzibar was not a place I would ever dream of visiting except in a group, but a demon in me whispered that it was wrong for me to be nothing but a machine for churning out words. 'You owe it to yourself to live a little, Harry...' as Clint breathes to himself in Dirty Harry Dirty Harry.

Who was I at this time? I still found that people were bothered by my front, my ease, my apparent oh, I don't know effortlessness, invulnerability, lack of need? Something in me riled ... no not riled, sometimes riled perhaps, but mostly intrigued or baffled ... something in me intrigued or baffled, triggered a mixture of exasperation and curiosity.

How could somebody be so m.u.f.fled up against the cruel winds of the world, so armed against the missiles of fate, so complete? Be great great to see them drunk. See their guard down. Find out what makes them tick. to see them drunk. See their guard down. Find out what makes them tick.

I really do believe that there are those who would like and trust me better if they saw me weeping into a whisky, making a fool of myself, getting aggressive, maudlin and drunkenly out of control. I have never found those states in others anything other than tiring, awkward, embarra.s.sing and fantastically dull, but I am quite sure that people would cherish a view of me in that condition at least once in a while. As it happens I am almost never out of control no matter how much I drink. My limbs may well lose coordination, but they have so little to begin with that it is hard to tell the difference. But I certainly never become aggressive or violent or weepy. This is clearly a fault.

Back then I could see that outsiders looking in on the Stephen Fry they encountered saw a man who had drawn life's winning lottery ticket. I did not seem to have it in me to project the vulnerability, fear, insecurity, doubt, inadequacy, puzzlement and inability to cope that I so very often felt.

The signs were writ large for those with the wit to read. The cars alone screamed so much, surely? An Aston Martin, a Jaguar XJ12, a Wolseley 15/50, an Austin Healey 100/6 in concourse condition, an Austin Westminster, an MG Magnette, an MGB roadster ...

People saw me riding around in these woody, leathery chariots and thought them the automobile equivalent of the tweed jacket and cavalry twills in which I still dressed myself. 'Good old Stephen. He's from another world, really. Quintessentially English. Old-fas.h.i.+oned values. Cricket, crosswords, cla.s.sic cars, clubland. Bless.' Or they thought, 'Pompous, smug Oxbridge t.w.a.t in his young fogey brogues and sn.o.bby cars. What a git.' And I thought, 'What a fraud. Half-Jewish poof who doesn't really know what he's doing or who he is but is still the same sly, skulking, sweet-scoffing teenager he ever was, never quite fitting in. Destroyed by love, incapable of being loved, unworthy of being loved.'

Till the day I die people will always prefer to see me as strong, comfortable and English, like a good leather club chair. I have learned long ago not to fight it. Besides, and this is more than a question of good manners (although actually good manners are reason enough), why should anyone bleat on about what they feel inside all the time? It isn't dignified, it isn't interesting and it isn't attractive.

Any armchair psychologist can see that someone with my history of teenage Sturm Sturm and adolescent and adolescent Drang Drang (the needy sugar addiction, alienation, wild moods, unhappy sensualism, blighted romance, thieving, expulsions, fraud and imprisonment (the needy sugar addiction, alienation, wild moods, unhappy sensualism, blighted romance, thieving, expulsions, fraud and imprisonment) who is suddenly given a new lease of life and the chance to work and make a preposterous amount of money, might well respond as I did and make a series of silly and self-conscious attempts at display, to prove to himself and to the family whose life he made such a misery that he was now someone someone. Someone who belonged belonged. Look, I have cars and credits cards and club members.h.i.+ps and a country house. I know the name of the head waiter at Le Caprice. I am st.i.tched into England like Connollized leather into the seat of an Aston.

If asked, I would have told you that I was happy. I was happy. I was content, certainly, which is to happy what Pavillon Rouge is to Chateau Margaux, I suppose, but which will have to do for most of us.

Sat.u.r.day Live was adjudged a hit, and perhaps as a result of our appearances on it Hugh and I were summoned once more to Jim Moir's office to see if we couldn't waggle our c.o.c.ks in the air and get someone to kneel and suck, or 'put a show together', as other, lesser comedy executives might have put it. was adjudged a hit, and perhaps as a result of our appearances on it Hugh and I were summoned once more to Jim Moir's office to see if we couldn't waggle our c.o.c.ks in the air and get someone to kneel and suck, or 'put a show together', as other, lesser comedy executives might have put it.

After the BBC's lack of interest in The Crystal Cube The Crystal Cube, we were leery about high-concept programmes and determined that we should have a shot at committing to screen what we knew best, sketch comedy.

'Excellent,' said Richard Armitage. 'You can do that next year. But first Stephen ...' He rubbed his hands together, and his eyes gleamed. 'Broadway.'

Clipper Cla.s.s, Cote Basque and Ch.o.r.eography Mike Ockrent and I flew to New York together in clipper cla.s.s, PanAm's equivalent of business, where you could eat and drink and smoke until your eyes, liver and lungs bubbled. We had a few days, and our job was to dazzle Richard's potential financiers and co-producers. Robert Lindsay was already there. This was my first-ever trip to the United States, and I had to keep hugging myself. I had often fantasized about America as a child and felt that, when I got there, I should find that I already knew it and love it all the more for that.

I shan't distress you too much with my thoughts about the Manhattan skyline. If you haven't visited New York City yourself, you have seen it in film and television and you know that there are a lot of very, very tall buildings crowded together on a relatively small island. You will know there are long tunnels and rattly bridges. There is a central oblong park, wide avenues that run arrow-straight down from one end to the other, rhythmically intersected by numbered streets. You will know that the avenues also have numbers, except when they are called Madison, Park, Lexington, Amsterdam or West End. You will know there is just one exception, one daring diagonal thoroughfare that carves its way down from the top-left corner of the island, ignoring the symmetry of the grid, creating squares, circuses and slivered scalenes of open s.p.a.ce as it slices its way south-west Verdi Square, Dante Park, Columbus Circle, Madison Square, Herald Square, Union Square. You will know that this outlaw diagonal is called Broadway. You will know too that where Broadway meets 42nd Street at Times Square, the heart of New York theatre beats and has done so for a hundred years.

I walked around the theatre district, rubbernecking the neon, bowing to the statue of George M. Cohan ('Give my regards to Broadway' it says on the plinth, and to this day I get a lump in my throat every time I see that more out of veneration for James Cagney's impersonation of him than out of love or knowledge of Cohan himself), seating myself in the Carnegie Deli to write postcards, subjecting myself to the overwhelming rudeness of the waiters and trying to make sense of a Ruben Special. Everything in New York is exactly exactly what you expect and yet it still astonishes you. Had I come to Manhattan and found that the avenues were winding and bendy, the buildings low and squat and the people slow, drawling and kindly and that there was no trace of that fabled charge of energy that you drew from the very pavements as you walked on them, then I would have had cause to blink and shake my head in wonder. As it is, the town was precisely what I knew it would be, what legend, fable, literature and Tin Pan Alley had long reported it to be, down to the clouds of steam blooming from the manholes, the boatlike wallow of the huge chequer cabs as they bounced and flipped their tyres on the great iron sheets that seemed to have been casually slung by a giant on to the surface of the street and the strange smoky whiff at every street corner that turned out, on inquiry, to be the smell of new-baked pretzel. Just what I had always known. Yet every five steps I took I could not but stop and grin and gasp and stretch my eyes at the theatre of it all, the noise and rudeness and vitality. Affirmation of what we absolutely expect comes as more of a shock than disaffirmation. what you expect and yet it still astonishes you. Had I come to Manhattan and found that the avenues were winding and bendy, the buildings low and squat and the people slow, drawling and kindly and that there was no trace of that fabled charge of energy that you drew from the very pavements as you walked on them, then I would have had cause to blink and shake my head in wonder. As it is, the town was precisely what I knew it would be, what legend, fable, literature and Tin Pan Alley had long reported it to be, down to the clouds of steam blooming from the manholes, the boatlike wallow of the huge chequer cabs as they bounced and flipped their tyres on the great iron sheets that seemed to have been casually slung by a giant on to the surface of the street and the strange smoky whiff at every street corner that turned out, on inquiry, to be the smell of new-baked pretzel. Just what I had always known. Yet every five steps I took I could not but stop and grin and gasp and stretch my eyes at the theatre of it all, the noise and rudeness and vitality. Affirmation of what we absolutely expect comes as more of a shock than disaffirmation.

Richard's possible colleagues for the Broadway production were two Americans, James Nederlander, who seemed to own half the theatres in America, and Terry Allen Kramer, who seemed to own half the real estate in Manhattan. They were serious and hard-boiled business people. They had it in their heads that the British couldn't ch.o.r.eograph, and when an American producer has an idea in their head, nothing can s.h.i.+ft it, not Mr Muscle, not TNT, not electric-shock treatment.

Jimmy Nederlander was convinced he knew the secret of a good musical.

'It's gotta have heart,' he told me over lunch at the Cote Basque on 55th Street, with Terry, Mike and Robert. 'I saw your show in London and I said to my wife, "Honey, this show has got f.u.c.king heart. It's got f.u.c.king heart, we should do it." She agreed.'

'It's gotta have proper ch.o.r.eography too,' growled Terry.

Terry Allen Kramer liked to say that, while she wasn't the richest woman in America, she certainly paid more tax than any woman in America. She had at one time owned majority shares in Columbia Pictures as well as having large quant.i.ties of oil money and property, including the block on which the Cote Basque, made famous by Truman Capote, stood.

When I had arrived there for the lunch appointment I had found myself almost paralysed by the snootiness of the waiters. New York is an infinitely ritzier and more cla.s.s-bound city than London. White-gloved, liveried and top-lofty elevator attendants, doormen, chauffeurs and maitres d' maitres d' can make life h.e.l.l for those without social confidence. Adrift on an alien sh.o.r.e, all the ease I had ama.s.sed over the years that allowed me to meet a headwaiter's eye squarely at the Ritz or Le Caprice now deserted me. Abroad is b.l.o.o.d.y, as George VI liked to say. Abroad, no matter how high you have climbed the ladders at home, forces you to slide down the snakes and start again. can make life h.e.l.l for those without social confidence. Adrift on an alien sh.o.r.e, all the ease I had ama.s.sed over the years that allowed me to meet a headwaiter's eye squarely at the Ritz or Le Caprice now deserted me. Abroad is b.l.o.o.d.y, as George VI liked to say. Abroad, no matter how high you have climbed the ladders at home, forces you to slide down the snakes and start again.

'Yessssss?' hissed the waiter who floated up to me as I had glanced with overdone nonchalance around the dining-room, the very effort of projecting a casual proprietorial air betraying all the illness at ease and inferiority I was feeling.

'Oh, um, well. I'm meeting some people for lunch, I'm afraid I'm a little early ... should I ... er ... sorry.'

'Name?'

'Stephen Fry. Sorry.'

'Let me see ... I find no reservation under that name.'

'Oh. Sorry! No, that's my my name, sorry.' name, sorry.'

'Uh! And in what name is the reservation?'

'I think probably in the name of Kramer. Sorry. Do you have a table in the name of Terry Allen Kramer?'

It was as if the current had suddenly been switched on. A smile lit up the waiter's whole countenance, his body language transformed itself from drooping contempt to drooling abas.e.m.e.nt, quivering attention and hysterical respect.

'Sir, I'm sure sure Mrs Kramer would Mrs Kramer would love love for you to be seated and maybe have a gla.s.s of champagne or a c.o.c.ktail? Would you like something to read while you wait? Mrs Kramer is usually ten minutes late, so perhaps some olives? An ashtray? for you to be seated and maybe have a gla.s.s of champagne or a c.o.c.ktail? Would you like something to read while you wait? Mrs Kramer is usually ten minutes late, so perhaps some olives? An ashtray? Anything Anything? Anything at all? Thank you, sir.'

Lordy. And indeed she had been ten minutes late, sweeping in and gathering up Jimmy Nederlander, Mike Ockrent and Robert Lindsay, who by this time had joined me on the uncomfortable anteroom sofa.

A telephone had been brought to the table and plugged into a socket by the wall for her as we sat down. Through this she had hollered instructions to minions at her office during the course of lunch.

When it came time for pudding she looked around the table. 'Who wants dessert? You guys want dessert?'

I nodded with enthusiasm, and she loudly clapped her hands. 'Andre, get the pastry cart.'

Le chariot a patisseries was duly wheeled before us loaded with exquisite was duly wheeled before us loaded with exquisite delices delices. Terry Allen Kramer pointed at one more than ordinarily luxurious tower of cream, glazed pastry and crystallized fruits. 'What's that?' she barked.

Andre went into his spiel. 'Madame, it is a mousseline mousseline of of almandine almandine and and nougatine nougatine whipped into a whipped into a sabayon sabayon of of praline praline and and souffline souffline ...' and so forth. Cutting him short, Terry positioned her hand over the pristine surface of this gorgeous creation and with one long pull dug up a great scoop of it, sucked it from her fingers with a loud smack, c.o.c.ked her head to one side, thought for a moment and then said, turning her head away from the waiter as she did so, 'Take it away, it's s.h.i.+t.' ...' and so forth. Cutting him short, Terry positioned her hand over the pristine surface of this gorgeous creation and with one long pull dug up a great scoop of it, sucked it from her fingers with a loud smack, c.o.c.ked her head to one side, thought for a moment and then said, turning her head away from the waiter as she did so, 'Take it away, it's s.h.i.+t.'

Robert and I stared with open mouths. Mike later suggested that she did this to impress us with her ruthlessness, to make us aware that we were expendable and that she took no prisoners. I simply thought it was the single most ghastly thing I had ever seen a human do, and I had once seen a man take out his c.o.c.k and p.i.s.s all over the desk of a four-star hotel lobby, splas.h.i.+ng a receptionist and two bystanders.

Terry noticed that we were looking at her and smiled grimly. 'The dessert was s.h.i.+t. s.h.i.+t is s.h.i.+t. Did I say about how important the ch.o.r.eography is?'

If that lunch had been a test we somehow pa.s.sed it, and Terry and Jimmy duly agreed to pony up.

I went back to England, and Hugh and I set about starting to write for next year's pilot of a Fry and Laurie TV sketch show.

'We should do a tour,' Hugh said.

'A tour?'

'If we agree to a live show around the country then that will force us to write material for it. We're not allowed to do Shakespeare Mastercla.s.s, or Dracula ... only new material.'

Although we were not really well known and certainly nothing like as famous as Harry and Ben were becoming, there was a sizeable enough demand for us in college and university towns, it seemed, and a tour was arranged. We wrote and stared out of the window and paced up and down and bought Big Macs and looked out of the window and went for walks and tore at our hair and swore and watched television and bought more Big Macs and swore again and wrote and screamed with horror as the clock showed that another day was over and we looked at what we had written and groaned and agreed to meet again first thing next day whosever turn it was agreeing to arrive with some coffee and Big Macs.

After we had a.s.sembled some material I had to go back to New York for Me and My Girl Me and My Girl rehearsals. The plan was for me to return after the opening. We would tour and record a one-off Fry and Laurie pilot show to be screened at Christmas and followed the next year by a series. rehearsals. The plan was for me to return after the opening. We would tour and record a one-off Fry and Laurie pilot show to be screened at Christmas and followed the next year by a series.

Me and My Girl rehea.r.s.ed in Manhattan somewhere down near the Flatiron Building. I had never seen such facilities or met with such order in the course of a theatrical venture. There was a dance room, a song room and even a book room, a huge s.p.a.ce dedicated to rehearsing my bits and my bits alone. I even had my own writer's room off it, handsomely supplied with desk, electric typewriter, stationery and coffee percolator. Mike Ockrent led the same production team, but only Robert remained from the British cast. Enn Reitel had taken over from him in London, and would be followed by Gary Wilmot, Karl Howman, Brian Conley, Les Dennis and many others in the course of its long run. Here in New York Robert had Maryann Plunkett, whom I had seen in rehea.r.s.ed in Manhattan somewhere down near the Flatiron Building. I had never seen such facilities or met with such order in the course of a theatrical venture. There was a dance room, a song room and even a book room, a huge s.p.a.ce dedicated to rehearsing my bits and my bits alone. I even had my own writer's room off it, handsomely supplied with desk, electric typewriter, stationery and coffee percolator. Mike Ockrent led the same production team, but only Robert remained from the British cast. Enn Reitel had taken over from him in London, and would be followed by Gary Wilmot, Karl Howman, Brian Conley, Les Dennis and many others in the course of its long run. Here in New York Robert had Maryann Plunkett, whom I had seen in Sunday in the Park with George Sunday in the Park with George, playing opposite him as Sally and George S. Irving as Sir John.

I stayed at the Wyndham, an old-fas.h.i.+oned actor's hotel on 58th Street whose rooms were s.p.a.cious chintzy suites with bathrooms and fittings that believed it was still 1948. By each bed was a white telephone with no dial or b.u.t.tons. When you picked up the receiver it connected you to the front desk. 'I'd like to make a call,' you would tell the operator. You gave the number you wanted and hung up. Five minutes or half an hour later, according to whim or luck, the phone would ring, and you would be through. Most nights at about two or three I would be jerked awake by the phone's cras.h.i.+ng buzz.

'Yes?'

'Your call to Rome, Italy ...'

'I didn't ask for a call to Rome.'

'My mistake. Wrong number. Thank you.'

At breakfast I fell into the habit of chatting with some of the long-term guests, almost all of them actors or theatre people. A favourite was Raymond Burr, enormously bulky but very kindly and cheerful, despite the habitually tired bloodhound droop of his eyes. He went so far as to ask my advice about doing more Perry Mason Perry Mason on television. on television.

'Do young people remember it?'

'Well, I have to confess it was before my time,' I said to him. 'But I loved Ironside Ironside.'

'Why thank you. They don't want to do more Ironside Ironside, but there is talk of more Perry Mason Perry Mason. You never saw it?'

'I'm sure television could do with a really good legal series. He was a lawyer, that is right?'

'Oh my. I shall have to tell the producers. I met a smart young Englishman and he had barely heard of Perry Mason. Oh my.'

If Raymond Burr wasn't available for conversation I had in another corner of the breakfast room Broadway's ancient royal couple, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. They spoke to me through each other.

'Oh look, honey, here's the English fellow. I wonder how his rehearsals are going.'

'Not too bad,' I would reply. 'The cast seem amazing to me.'

'He says the cast is amazing! Is he confident of a hit I wonder?'

'Oh well, you know. It's pretty much in the lap of the G.o.ds. By which I mean the lap of the critics I suppose.'

'He's calling the critics G.o.ds, honey, did you hear that? G.o.ds!'

And so on.

Once rehearsals kicked in, I saw something of the American work ethic. Compet.i.tion for parts in the chorus was so tough that they never relaxed. During time off the boys and girls were teaching each other new steps, practising vocal scales and warming up or down according to the time of day. And drinking water all the time. We are now so used to it all over the western world that one has to remind oneself that there was a time when young Americans didn't feel naked without a bottle of water in their hands.

I also saw something of the meaning of the star system. It is a kind of paradox of America, the republic that freed itself of the inequitable shackles of monarchy, cla.s.s and social rank, that it chooses to privilege stars with a status far beyond that of any European duke or prince. As with any true aristocracy, the principles of n.o.blesse oblige n.o.blesse oblige apply to stars. Robert told me of the time they all went upstate to film a TV commercial. It was a long and tiring day in humid summer, chorus members were clanking around in medieval armour, pearly suits and fur-lined cloaks, and take after take was called for. As the shoot wore on Robert noticed a diminution in friendliness towards him that he could not understand. He asked Maryann Plunkett whether he had done something wrong. apply to stars. Robert told me of the time they all went upstate to film a TV commercial. It was a long and tiring day in humid summer, chorus members were clanking around in medieval armour, pearly suits and fur-lined cloaks, and take after take was called for. As the shoot wore on Robert noticed a diminution in friendliness towards him that he could not understand. He asked Maryann Plunkett whether he had done something wrong.

'Everyone is very tired and very hot, and I think they'd like it to be over.'

'Well, yes, me too,' said Robert, 'but how is that my fault?'

'Robert, you're the star! You're the company leader. You You decide if it's time for everyone to wrap and go home.' decide if it's time for everyone to wrap and go home.'

'B-but ...' Robert, of course, had been brought up in the self-consciously 'we're all mates here' cooperative atmosphere of British theatre, where no one would ever dare dare pull starry rank. Because we have a cla.s.s system in Britain we go out of our way to make sure that it is made plain that everyone is absolutely equal. Because America doesn't, they seem to revel in the power, status and prestige that achievement can bring. pull starry rank. Because we have a cla.s.s system in Britain we go out of our way to make sure that it is made plain that everyone is absolutely equal. Because America doesn't, they seem to revel in the power, status and prestige that achievement can bring.

'Robert, it's your duty to make decisions for us ...'

Swallowing nervously, and grateful that none of his British contemporaries were witnessing the moment, he spoke up to the director in front of everyone. 'Right, Tommy. One more take only and then everyone needs to get out of costume and be on their way.'

'Sure, Bob,' said the director. 'Absolutely. Whatever you say.'

Everybody smiled, and Robert learned the duties and responsibilities of stardom.

Me and My Girl tried out in downtown Los Angeles, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, then best known as the location of the annual Academy Awards ceremony. I stayed at the Biltmore Hotel off Pers.h.i.+ng Square, almost near enough the theatre to walk. This was Los Angeles, of course, and, as everyone knows, walking is never done there. Besides, when you have rented a bright-red convertible Mustang you want to use it at every opportunity. There was really very little for me to do other than attend the early performances and occasionally offer new s.n.a.t.c.hes of dialogue as required. After a week at the Biltmore, charming as it was, I thought I might as well blow all my per diems on a weekend at the Bel-Air Hotel. For the low, low price of $1,500 a night I had a little bungalow and a beautiful garden in which my own private hummingbird flitted about just for me. On the second night I invited the chorus, who somehow jammed themselves in, drank $600 worth of wine and liquor and vamoosed in a cloud of kisses and extravagant grat.i.tude. tried out in downtown Los Angeles, in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, then best known as the location of the annual Academy Awards ceremony. I stayed at the Biltmore Hotel off Pers.h.i.+ng Square, almost near enough the theatre to walk. This was Los Angeles, of course, and, as everyone knows, walking is never done there. Besides, when you have rented a bright-red convertible Mustang you want to use it at every opportunity. There was really very little for me to do other than attend the early performances and occasionally offer new s.n.a.t.c.hes of dialogue as required. After a week at the Biltmore, charming as it was, I thought I might as well blow all my per diems on a weekend at the Bel-Air Hotel. For the low, low price of $1,500 a night I had a little bungalow and a beautiful garden in which my own private hummingbird flitted about just for me. On the second night I invited the chorus, who somehow jammed themselves in, drank $600 worth of wine and liquor and vamoosed in a cloud of kisses and extravagant grat.i.tude.

LA was our only try-out town, and the show had gone well enough in front of a mostly elderly subscription audience. Broadway was next, and from here there was no escape and no second chances. It is a known oddity of the New York theatre world that a production is made or broken almost solely by its review in the New York Times. New York Times. It is the paper, incidentally, not the reviewer, that wields this terrible power. As Bernard Levin once observed, a Barbary Ape could hold the post of It is the paper, incidentally, not the reviewer, that wields this terrible power. As Bernard Levin once observed, a Barbary Ape could hold the post of Times Times reviewer and still have the power to close a show. Frank Rich was the current Barbary Ape that we had to please, and there was no knowing until the night whether his thumb would go up or down. If it went down the whole production would fold, Jimmy, Terry and Richard would lose their money, and the cast would all be fired. Humiliation all round. reviewer and still have the power to close a show. Frank Rich was the current Barbary Ape that we had to please, and there was no knowing until the night whether his thumb would go up or down. If it went down the whole production would fold, Jimmy, Terry and Richard would lose their money, and the cast would all be fired. Humiliation all round.

We had already earned a certain measure of ill will in the town by being the first show to open in the Marriott Marquis Theatre, built as part of a major Times Square reconstruction project. To make way for an enormous new hotel, the much loved Helen Hayes Theatre had been pulled down to such a howl of impa.s.sioned protest that the Marriott group promised to integrate a new theatre into the development, and the Marquis was it.

At the dress rehearsal nerves were frayed, and Jimmy Nederlander and Terry Allen Kramer, being denied, as producers, any other outlet for their tension than the pleasure of firing people, had scented blood. Their old insecurity on the issue of the dance numbers resurfaced, and, sitting behind them, I heard mutters and growls about Gillian Gregory, the ch.o.r.eographer. How they thought firing her the day before previews began could possibly help I do not know, but I suppose plenty of shows had been rescued in shorter time than that. I a.s.sume they liked the idea of bringing in Tommy Tune or Bob Fosse or some other legend of dance, having them work everyone eighteen hours a day for three days and then telling the world how they had fired a.s.ses and saved the show. American entertainment tyc.o.o.ns do like to see themselves cast in the mythological tough uncompromising sonofab.i.t.c.h mould. Theatre people hate dramatics they get enough of that at work; non-theatre people dramatize everything around them.

I caught hold of Richard Armitage and mentioned that I had heard grumblings.

'Hm,' he said. 'I shall have to do something about that.'

We sat and watched an energetic but somehow spiritless dress rehearsal. The new theatre smelled of carpet glue and wood varnish. It had fluorescent strips for house lights, which meant that they couldn't be faded up or down, but only flickered on and off, killing the atmosphere. Even when they went out the exit signs were so brightly lit you could easily read your programme from their lurid spill. The doors at the back of the auditorium were horribly over-sprung such that, no matter how gently you tried to close them, they made a terrible bang, and if people didn't know about them and let them go without care it was as if a gunshot had gone off. The dancing had been, to my untutored non-specialist eye, spectacular, but Terry Allen Kramer scribbled savagely in her notebook every time a leg kicked or a body twirled.

When finally the curtain came down for the ending she stood and opened her mouth.

'The ch.o.r.eo ...'

Richard's voice drowned her out. 'd.a.m.n. Well, those house lights are a disaster. And the doors and the exit signs. But there's nothing we can do about that in time for the first preview. Just nothing. It would take a miracle.'

Terry uttered a harsh bark. 'Nothing? Ha! That's what you you think! There's think! There's plenty plenty we can do. Bill Marriott is a personal friend. I don't care if I have to wake him up, he'll G.o.dd.a.m.n sort this out. Someone get me to a phone we can do. Bill Marriott is a personal friend. I don't care if I have to wake him up, he'll G.o.dd.a.m.n sort this out. Someone get me to a phone right now right now!'