Image: amazon.com
On Monday this week I had the good fortune to join other Aucklanders to see and hear Stephen Fry. He talked about himself and the people he has met. This was a good excuse to update my mini-biography of Fry (from 21 Remarkable People) – with some of his brilliant stories (the ones about Winston Churchill I’m saving for a later piece).
Sirocco is a 4 kg flightless nocturnal parrot. He imprinted on humans as he was being hand-fed in infancy, so now he sees them as buddies and potential sexual partners.
Sirocco shot to fame when Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine were filming Last Chance to See – a TV series about species sliding to extinction. Kakapo, of which Sirocco is one, at that time of just a few, were strong candidates for coverage. About the size of your average chook, originally ridiculously common (a bushman in early northwest South Island said – just shake a shrub and Kakapo will tumble out), they provided fast food for settlers. Sirocco’s attempt to mate with Carwardine’s head became a stand-out feature of the Last Chance series. The video includes Stephen Fry asking – “is that parrot trying to shag your head?”.
Funny things happen to Fry. Many of them of his own making. In one of his autobiographies, he describes his tendency to make up stories. He confided to a boarding school friend that his parents had been killed in a car accident. When busted for this fib, Fry ‘explained’; “You mustn’t mind me…I say these things” (quotes are mostly from The Fry Chronicles, 2010).
While at school Fry joined the Sherlock Holmes Society – their youngest member. He was invited to London to lecture on Moriarty (the arch-nemesis of Holmes). Instead of returning to his boarding school Fry spent days in movie theatres watching such classics as Cabaret (starring Liza Minnelli), A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and the mildly pornographic animation Fritz the Cat. When he made it to school his parents were waiting, the Police had been notified and a story about his absence had appeared in the local paper. Fry was expelled.
After further expulsions Fry ran away from home, stole credit cards and enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle. He returned to his Swindon hotel room to find two men – “I don’t need the bed turned down thank you”. One of the detectives showed Fry his ID.
Stephen Fry is open about his inclination to be easily distracted and his mood swings; the suite of anxiety, depression and cravings that bubble below his consummate performance.
Fry made it to Cambridge University with serious doubts about his credentials: “I lived in quivering dread of being found out…the terror that gripped me during those first few weeks at Cambridge was all about my intellectual right to be there”.
Imagine his amazement when he was visited by a delegation of college first-year contemporaries at Cambridge – who wanted to know the secret of his cool. He describes this cool persona as “English. Tweedy. Pukka. Confident. Establishment. Self-assured. In charge…It may be the case that I am a Jewish mongrel with an addictive self-destructive streak that it has taken me years to master. It may be the case that my afflictions of mood and temperament cause me to be occasionally suicidal in outlook and can frequently leave me in despair and eaten up with self-hatred and self-disgust”.
Fry does a great line in modesty, including claiming that his modesty began as an act, a façade that ultimately pervaded his values and personality as he has lived it; “…my particular brand of exhibitionism – I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty and touching false diffidence. To be less hard on myself, I think these displays of affability, modesty and diffidence may once have been false but have now become pretty much real”. This is on display when he contrasts his talents with those of his long-term creative partner Hugh Laurie; “Hugh had music where I had none. He had an ability to be daft and clownish…what did I have? Patter and fluency I suppose.”
Fry managed a radical change in fortune from teenage “badolescent” to wild success (his self-doubt notwithstanding). He gives credit to the potential for change while noting the persistence of personality; “I believe that change, improvement, heuristic development and the acquisition and advancement of learning and wisdom are all possible and desirable. I also believe that leopards will always be spotty, skunks smelly and Stephen idiotically wasteful and extravagant. Some things are not susceptible to change.”
He achieved dramatic improvement in his singing after a hypnotherapy session. Fry was due to sing in a skit but was terrified at the prospect. The hypnotherapist guided him to a warm, safe, imaginary space where he relived an unpleasant singing experience from boarding school. The therapist suggested that he smile at the memory, then helped by giving him a positive singing response to the cue he would receive in the skit. All went well on the night. This week Fry elaborated on this story; the cue for his singing was “Hit it bitch!”. Fry recounted how on another occasion he had to sing; he ran to the phone, rang fellow skit artist Hugh Laurie and asked him to again order him to “Hit it bitch!”
Fry entertained his schoolmates with after-lights-out horror stories, he is an accomplished actor and brilliant mimic. His poise and “cool” might, as he asserts, originally have been a part of him playing a role but are now part of who he is.