‘Someone answer it!’
Fourteen people slumbering, showering or shagging … not one of them, it seems, capable of answering the bloody telephone.
‘Will someone just … oh never mind!’ Abandoning that consignment of hollandaise to failure, I strode to the phone and yanked it from its bracket.
‘Yes,’ I barked testily.
‘Um, can I speak to Stephen Fry, please?’
‘This is he.’
‘Ah, it’s the Prince of Wales here.’
A moment. A heartbeat, no more. And in that short series of milliseconds my brain had instructed my mouth to say: ‘Oh fuck off, Rory.’
But somehow one always knows when one is listening to the real thing, not to Rory Bremner or any another impressionist, no matter how skillful. That same brain sent an even faster order to overtake and countermand the first.
‘Hello, sir!’ I managed to choke. ‘I’m afraid you caught me trying to make a hollandaise sauce …’
‘Ah. I’m so sorry. I was wondering, um, wondering about taking you up on that offer and, um, coming for tea?’
‘Of course. That would be marvellous. Absolutely splendid. When did you have in mind?’
‘How about New Year’s Day?’
‘Fabulous. I look forward to it.’
I replaced the phone carefully in its cradle. Hmmm.
I stood in the hallway of the house and, like Rik or Mike in The Young Ones, called ‘House meeting!’ at the top of my voice. Slowly people appeared at the heads of stairways and grumblingly made their way down, like the guests in the fire-alarm scene in Fawlty Towers. It was probably about eight in the morning, and I am long used to the dislike and annoyance my being a cheerful morning lark engenders. Most people are owls and take a lot of getting up.
‘Look, sorry everyone, but the day after tomorrow the Prince of Wales is coming for tea.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Ha fucking ha.’
‘You woke me up for this?’
I held up a hand. ‘Seriously. He really is.’
But I had lost my audience, who were already tightening their dressing-gown cords and trudging back up the stairs.
It was only when, on the following day, a dark green Range Rover appeared that I was finally truly believed. Two detectives and a dog got out, cordially welcomed a proffered tea and poked around … for what we were unable to ascertain. After this cursory security screening of the house and a multitude of chocolate Hobnobs they had gone. My house guests swarmed around me.
‘Well!’
‘Oh my lord!’
‘What on earth am I going to wear?’
All of us adults were traditionally and pleasingly left-leaning without being rude, yet now we found ourselves to be as flushed and excited as a kennelful of beagle puppies hearing the clink of the leash.
We all arose early the next morning. Why I didn’t photograph Hugh Laurie hoovering the drawing-room carpet I have no idea. It would be worth millions in blackmail money today. Ah well.*
Everything is polished, swept, cleaned, washed, waxed and prepared. Teapots are at the ready, kettles half on and half off the hottest ring of the Aga. Bread, crumpets and muffins piled up for toasting. Butter softened. Jars of homemade blackcurrant jam and lemon curd (two Christmases’ worth of presents from my brother’s sister-in-law). Sandwiches are cut. Honey! I know he likes honey in his tea! A pot of runny honey is found somewhere. Has it gone off? Honey can’t go off, I am assured, a fact that is many years later confirmed for me by a QI elf. A wooden honey spoon is discovered in a drawer. The drawer also reveals a better tea-strainer, a proper silver one, not the rather naff Present From Hunstanton which was all I thought I had. Another teapot and a big Dundee cake for his police security men, who will be able to eat in the kitchen. Oh God, have we overdone it? Battenberg cake … hell, he might think we’re taking the piss. Battenberg was his family name once.
We leave the kitchen and crowd into the drawing room, which has a view through the drawn curtains of the driveway. It is dark, of course, and has been since early afternoon. It is only a week and a few days since the shortest day of the year. Hugh, who is diligent at this kind of duty, takes the log basket out to reload it. The fire is roaring splendidly, but you cannot have too many logs. Jon Canter, writer and friend, checks the candles that are artfully disposed around the room. I am still twitching one curtain and looking out into the night. Kim and Alastair are twitching another curtain and giggling like Japanese schoolgirls.
Headlamps, as in Dornford Yates novels, stab the air and sweep the hedgerows. But they are bypassing the driveway. We all look at our watches. Was it after all some gigantic hoax?
Then, before we even seem to know what is upon us, the gravel is crunched alive with the sound of two cars skidding to a halt before the front door.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘let’s …’
They have all scrammed. Skedaddled. Vamoosed.
‘Cowards!’ I just have time to shout before gulping, breathing deeply and placing myself on the mat. The front doorbell is rung. If I open the door immediately it will look as if I have been waiting like an uncool cat, which I have been and am, but I count to fifteen to dispel the idea and, just as the second peal begins, swing open the door with a smile.
‘Your Royal Highness …’
‘Hullo. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve brought my wife.’
Out of the shadows steps Princess Diana. She lowers her head and looks up in that characteristic fashion, captured so many times by Mario Testino and a thousand other photographers, smiling from under her lashes. ‘Hello, Stephen,’ she sweetly murmurs.
I conduct them into the drawing room. They look around and say approving things about my house. It has six bedrooms and is by no means a cottage, but it would fit comfortably into a half of one Sandringham wing. Well, it is all mine, inasmuch as I earned it and didn’t inherit it, so I can’t be that ashamed. I am not sure ‘earned’ is the right word, but this isn’t the time to go into that.
Slowly the house guests emerge like shy, hungry zoo animals at feeding time. Introductions are effected, the policemen shown into the kitchen by the back door. Is that rude and disrespectful? They don’t show offence, but then they wouldn’t. Of the Dundee cake not a crumb was left behind, so I must assume they felt at home.
Back in the drawing room. Hugh and Jo’s first child, Charlie, is just at the toddling stage. He lurches zombielike towards the television (yes, there is a television in my drawing room, which the Prince and you persons of tone and breeding must think grotesquely common, but there we are) and switches it on, a child entirely of his generation. Jo screams out ‘Charlie!’ and the Prince of Wales, one assumes unused to being addressed in this forceful, matronly manner, jumps sitting down, a clever trick. Meanwhile, to my mortification and that of his mother, EastEnders comes on to full blaring cockney life. She leaps to her feet to find the remote control. (That reminds me. Very funny Queen Mother story. Remind me to tell you.)
‘No, leave it on,’ says the Princess. ‘It’s the special New Year’s edition. I want to find out what happens to Ange.’
The Prince is relaxed and cheerful, the Princess charming and beguiling. She wears cowboy boots that suit her very well. The Prince does not wear cowboy boots, which suits him very well.
The honeyed tea and the buttered crumpets and the toast and the cakes last out until it is time for the royal pair to depart.
At the front door the Prince thanks me and bids everyone else farewell. Princess Diana holds in the threshold for a second longer, checks over her shoulder that her Prince is out of earshot and whispers softly in my ear, ‘Sorry to leave early, though secretly I’m quite glad. It’s Spitting Image tonight, and I want to watch it in my room. They hate it of course. I absolutely adore it.’
And there you have her in a nutshell. By telling me this she was putting me in her power. It was a statement then worth tens of thousands of pounds. ‘Princess Di Loves Anti-Royal Smut Puppet
s!’ All I had to do was pick up the phone to any tabloid. But by confiding in me she had made me in some measure her slave: to be trusted with such intelligence was to be appointed one of her special courtiers. Even as intellectual, sharp, brilliant, knowledgeable and impossibly well-read and sensible a man as Clive James was utterly devoted to her.
I closed the door and leaned back against it in that afraid-it-will-soon-be-opened-again-but-I’ll-defend-it-with-my-last-breath manner much noted in fast-paced Leonard Rossiter sitcoms.
‘Well!’ I said.
‘Well!’ said everyone else.
‘Awfully nice couple,’ said Jon Canter, ‘awfully nice. I didn’t get her name.’
For the post-mortem we opened a whisky bottle in the drawing room, caring nothing for clearing up the tea things.
‘Unbelievable,’ said one of the heterosexual male house guests, of which there were a more than ordinary percentage that Christmas. ‘Did you see how she looked at me? I was in there … she was practically looking up at the ceiling as if to suggest we go upstairs. Jesus!’
‘What are you talking about?’ another man interrupted. ‘That was me she was giving the eye to.’
‘No me!’
In the PR war the Prince of Wales never had a chance. His tireless work, his initiatives, the Prince’s Trust alone, none of these could compete with so perfect a piece of seductive nature.
For his fiftieth birthday (this is one of the stories I was going to tell you) I emceed an entertainment at the London Palladium. Afterwards I stood once more in the line-up. Next to me was Penn Jillette, one half of the brilliant Penn and Teller, American magicians, pro-science, sceptics of the highest rank.
Penn turned to me as he watched the Prince slowly coming down the line.
‘Do I have to call him “Your Majesty” or any of that shit?’
‘No, no. Not at all. If you were to use a title it would be “Your Royal Highness”, and from then on “sir”, but there’s no need. After all, I haven’t called you Penn once in this conversation until now, have I, Penn?’
‘Oh, OK, just so long as he understands that we don’t talk like that. And what about bowing? I have to bow? We don’t bow in America.’
‘No, no,’ I reassure him, ‘no bowing necessary.’
‘Cuz I’m an American, and we don’t bow.’
‘Yes, he knows you’re an American.’
‘I won’t get put in the Tower of London or anything?’
People always think that sojourns in the Tower of London, like knighthoods, are somehow in the gift of members of the royal family.
I reassured him on these points. No Highnessing, no kowtowing.
At last the Prince reaches Penn, who immediately falls almost prostrate to the floor. ‘Your Majesty Highness. Your Royal Sir …’ and so on and so forth, babbling like a gibbon on speed. The Prince passes on to me and whoever was the other side of me without turning a hair. Seen it all before.
After he had gone, I watched Penn, an enormous man, crouching on the floor, rolling about, beating the planks of the stage, sobbing, stuffing his fist into his mouth and moaning up to the fly-tower: ‘Why did I do that? What came over me? What power do they have? I betrayed my country!’
During the course of the early 1990s, I got to know Sir Martin Gilliat quite well. An extraordinary man. If you didn’t know him yourself I assure you you would have loved him. He was of a type that no longer exists and whose very background and manner would now, I suppose, be looked down upon very snootily. Ludgrove House, Eton and forty years Equerry and Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. ‘All Sir Martin’s geese are swans,’ was a popular saying in royal circles. Which, being interpreted, means that everyone was alike in splendour to him, low, high, of whatever background, breeding, race or gender. I never met a man of such natural charm, kindness and vivacity. He had had a ‘good war’, of which, naturally, he never spoke. He escaped the Nazis several times but was always recaptured. At last, like all serial escapers, he was sent to Colditz, the Eton of prison camps. I was told that he had never slept since. Not properly. Apparently doctors examined him until he got tired of it* and sent them packing. This made him ideal for the Queen Mother. She would dine festively, play amusing games and then go to bed round about one or two in the morning. He would sit up writing letters until she came down. They would walk the dogs together in the park. Ideal companions.
There is a story told in Hugo Vickers’s biography of Queen Elizabeth, as she was known in the Household. She liked pranks at parties. One evening after dinner at the Castle of Mey, her favourite residence, right up in the very north of Scotland in Caithness, she and the ladies, having retired to leave the men to their port, decided it would be a lark if they all hid behind the curtains to surprise the men when they came out after their port and cigars.
Sir Martin led the men out and said in his very loud voice, ‘Thank God for that, they’ve all fucked off to bed.’
I got to know him because he was an inveterate punter in the West End stage, what is known as an angel. He hit the motherlode with Me and My Girl and was forever grateful. He invited Rowan Atkinson (who also knew him) and me to Buck’s, his club, for lunch. Over the gulls’ eggs and asparagus he confessed that there was an ulterior motive for his invitation.
‘Marvellous to have you chaps to luncheon of course, but I have to ask you. Do you know the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn?’
We both regretfully disavowed ever having had that pleasure.
‘No? Well. She was a lady-in-waiting of Queen Elizabeth’s for many years. It is her eightieth birthday in July, and we, which is to say Queen Elizabeth, are going to throw her a birthday party at Claridge’s, and I thought perhaps you might provide a little light relief? We have a band, but comedy is always popular.’
Rowan and I digested this and exchanged speaking glances. The year before he and I had descended on the Middle East, a swoop known in Rowanese as a bank raid. Rowan and I performed in his amusingly entitled One Man Show in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Oman, brightening the lives of expat oil executives with high-quality, high-priced comedic entertainment. So we did have a show.
Rowan expressed our reservations perfectly.
‘Well now,’ he said. ‘We do indeed have material, b-but if most of the audience is the same age as the Duchess and the Queen Mo … Queen Elizabeth, then some of it might seem a bit …’
‘A bit fast? A bit racy?’ boomed Sir Martin, his resonant voice echoing off every surface of the dining room and rattling the glassware. ‘Oh I wouldn’t worry about that. The royal family loves the lavatory. I mean obviously not yer fucks or yer cunts.’
‘Well quite,’ said Rowan, swallowing and looking down at his plate. ‘No indeed.’
Sir Martin, as a loyal servant, was not one prone to gossip but he could not help telling me this story of his employer. One morning in the upstairs drawing room of Clarence House she said to him, ‘Martin, I think our television is on the blink. Do you think we might need a new one?’
‘I shall have a look, ma’am.’
Sure enough the television – this was many years ago – was suffering from that annoying rolling horizontal bar affliction that was the bane of many an ageing cathode ray tube.
‘Ma’am, I shall be straight on the telephone to those nice people at Harrods, and while you’re at luncheon they will install a new one.’
‘Lovely, Martin. You’re an angel.’
This was, of course, before the days of the not-so-cold war between the royal households and Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods.
After her luncheon the Queen Mother – Queen Elizabeth, I beg her pardon – tottered upstairs to watch the three o’clock from Chepstow or whatever it may have been, and there was Sir Martin, standing proudly by a brand-new, very large television set.
‘Oh, how grand!’ said Queen Elizabeth.
‘Yes indeed, ma’am, and I’ll tell you something rather special.’
‘Oh do, do!’
‘You might notice that it has no buttons for changing the channels.’
‘Oh no,’ she squealed, ‘they’ve forgotten the buttons. How dreadful!’
‘Ah, but no, ma’am. Do you see that grey box next to your gin and Dubonnet on the side table there?’
‘Oh, now whatever can that be?’
‘Well that is what they call a “remote control”, ma’am. If you’ll allow me … I press the button marked 1, so, and up comes BBC 1. I press button 2 and up comes BBC 2. And then button 3 for ITV. You see?’
‘Oh, how clever!’ Queen Elizabeth beamed approvingly and then added, ‘I still think it’s easier to ring.’
Living the Life
Over the decades I have been asked to deliver lectures, disquisitions and addresses on numerous subjects and for the most part I manage to excuse myself. Just occasionally, however, a subject is so appealing or a cause so close to my heart and my diary so surprisingly and unwontedly amenable that I find myself under an obligation to disgorge as requested. I offer you the opening of a lecture I gave in the Royal Geographical Society’s lecture theatre some years ago: the first Spectator Lecture, or Speccie Leccie, as I called it. I have scavenged from it and present the exordium so as to make coherent some of my thoughts about America, a country I was becoming more and more fond of and anxious to visit more and more often.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Good lord. Well, well. Here we are. Gathered together in the very lecture theatre where Henry Morton Stanley once told an enraptured world of his momentous meeting with Dr Livingstone. Charles Darwin was a member and gave talks in this same hall. Sir Richard Burton lectured here, and John Hanning Speke … spoke. Shackleton and Hillary displayed their intimate frostbite scars to a spellbound RGS audience. Explorers, adventurers and navigators have been coming here for the best part of 180 years to tell of their discoveries. If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land. Actually, now that I think of it, one reason for me to be fond of the subject was the circumstance that in my prep-school geography room there were piles and piles of shiny yellow National Geographic magazines available for skimming through. These, with their glossy advertisements for Chesterfield cigarettes, Cadillac sedans and Dimple whisky, gave me my first view outside television of what America might be like. But there was another reason religiously to scan the magazines …