Free More Fool Me by Stephen Fry Page A

Englishman with odd hair who rings a faint bell in the eye of the average Bulgarian or Bolivian, if bells can be rung in eyes, that is.
    I remember a marvellous line of Anthony Burgess’s when he reviewed, in, I think, the Observer , William Goldman’s peerless Adventures in the Screen Trade. Burgess used the phrase of film stars: ‘those irrelevantly endowed with adventitious photogeneity’. Or it may perhaps have been ‘those adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity’. It so happened that I got to know William Goldman well in the early to mid-1990s when John Cleese, in a breathtaking act of generosity, chartered a boat for about thirty to go up the Nile. All we guests had to do was turn up at the Cleesery in London, and the rest was taken care of: carriage to the airport, flights, laundry, food, sight-seeing, informative evening lectures – everything was looked after for us on the floating Claridge’s that glided up from Cairo to the Aswan Dam.
    One afternoon comes back very clearly to me. We were shading ourselves in the shadow of an ancient pylon in Luxor while our tour guide spoke of hieroglyphs and higher things. I asked Bill a few questions that I had been too shy to previously. He was hero enough for having written Adventures in the Screen Trade and earlier The Season , a still perfectly relevant and never less than insanely readable summation of one year in the life of Broadway. But Goldman was the screenwriter who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , All the President’s Men , Marathon Man and The Princess Bride and was, even then, chewing over whether he would accept the offer from Rob Reiner and Castle Rock to adapt Stephen King’s Misery.
    Unforgivably gauche as it seems, I found my mouth forming the shy sentence: ‘So, er, what’s Robert Redford really like?’
    ‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘tell me what you would be like if for twenty-five years you had never heard the word “no”.’
    Which is as good an answer as could be given. It is far from necessary and sufficient not to have heard the word ‘no’ for decades to become a brat, or spoiled or impossible to deal with, but it goes a long way to explaining some of the more painful characteristics of those who are called stars.
    It’s rather like the argument used to defend those brought up in poverty and abuse, however. It fails to explain those many who, under the same intolerable, horrific circumstances, do not become members of gangs or crack-smoking thugs who could remorselessly beat an old man to death for asking them to keep the noise down. There are those who have endured childhoods we can’t even imagine who go on to university and lives of fulfilment, kindness and familial bliss. Similarly there are long-established stars, Tom Hanks to pull a random name out of the Starry Sorting Hat, who are as kind, self-deprecating, professional, unspoiled and modest as it is possible to be.
    So we return to drugs. How can I explain the extraordinary waste of time and money that went into my fifteen-year habit? Tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as many hours, sniffing, snorting and tooting away time that could have been employed in writing, performing, thinking, exercising, living . I can’t begin to explain it, but I can at least attempt to describe it.



The Early Days
     
    The first effect of cocaine is of … nothing. You don’t get the huge, whoomping, rushing high that is said to be the reward of heroin or of crystal meth and crack. I haven’t tried any of those because I am a squeamish wimp. Perhaps this denies me any credit as a true addict. Friends like Sebastian Horsley and Russell Brand, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and all those rock stars of the 1970s who were unafraid to put a flame under a spoon, suck the juice into a syringe, tighten a tie round their biceps with their teeth, pump their fists and tap with two fingers until they found an available vein, whether it be, once the more available ones