I GOT DEPRESSED WHEN I SAW STEPHEN FRY HAD LEFT TWITTER. THEN I REMEMBERED I'D ONCE INTERVIEWED HIM AND IT'D BEEN GREAT. AND SUDDENLY I WAS HAPPY AGAIN.
Stephen Fry leaving Twitter and his 12.5 million followers is bad news. It’s like Ash Barty leaving tennis. Worse, probably. He wasn’t just a sustaining presence, he was the backbone of the place. Even if you didn’t wait up at night for him to Tweet, just the fact that he was there brought a lot of comfort. Like, how bad can a social media platform be if Stephen Fry’s on it?
So when I discovered he’d left, I got depressed. What’s Twitter without Fry? Then, I remembered I’d once interviewed him. And it had been educational and inspiring and funny and he’d had the flu and I didn’t catch it off him. And suddenly I looked at what I had rather than what I didn’t and I was happy again. My mental health walks along a tightrope at all times.
Here’s the interview. I think you’ll get what I mean.
***
COMO HOTEL, MELBOURNE. DECEMBER 28, 2003.
THERE’S no stopping Stephen Fry as he smokes, coughs, wheezes and sweats through another show-stopping speech to an audience of one.
A Fry soliloquy is something to behold - words, ideas and quotations tumbling out in torrents. In the past 15 minutes we’ve covered everything from Prince Charles’s alleged homosexuality ("Believe me, this is not a man that has sex with other men") to his long-held desire to open the bowling for England.
But right now our topic is Oscar Wilde, whom Fry portrayed so stunningly in the 1997 film, Wilde.
"When I was a teenager I remember watching The Importance of Being Earnest on TV one afternoon," he says. "And I was blown away by it. Other people my age were being blown away by Sgt. Peppers – but for me, it was The Importance of Being Earnest.
"I never knew language could do such things. Before that, I thought language was just something you used to get more food on your plate or to ask where the nearest lavatory is or to tell someone to ‘shut up’. I didn’t think it could be used the way that music could be used to delight, to enthrall.
"When I heard the line: ‘Would you be offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?’ I thought, ‘This is extraordinary. Words can dance. They can sing and dance.’ The hitting of the tongue on the back of the teeth has a physical, sensual pleasure to it. It’s a pleasure you also find when you read John Keats. But Wilde was that moment for me. It was an epiphany."
There’s a slight pause before Fry embarks on another coughing fit while holding up his hand as if to say: "Hang on, there's more."
This is a transfixing performance from the writer, actor, comedian and now director of the film, Bright Young Things.
Based on Evelyn Waugh's novel, Vile Bodies, the film is a satire on cynical young people living in the post-war English society of the 1920s and ‘30s. They're a witty, extravagantly dressed bunch who spend much of their time snorting cocaine at costume parties and exclaiming "what a bore" and "how shock-making".
After writing the screenplay to Bright Young Things, Fry was then encouraged to direct the film. He hesitated at first because he'd never directed before.
"You wear a different hat as a writer," he says. "Sometimes as a writer you leave problems for a director to sort out. So when the film’s producers asked me if I’d direct it, I had a couple of sleepless nights, then I rang them back and said, ‘If you think you can raise the money with me as director – go for it’."
Fry said the experience of locking-in finance from Hollywood was sometimes difficult with one executive asking of Waugh: "Was she (sic) well-known in her time? "
There were other problems with potential US backers thinking the story "too harsh or cruel" and wanting Fry to make amends by inserting the line "I love you" wherever possible. Fry told them most audiences could discern love and irony without having it spelt out.
Bright Young Things was eventually financed by Mirimax’s Harvey Weinstein – who famously put his foot down when Fry tried to reinstate the title, Vile Bodies. Weinstein said: "What is it? Some kind of morgue comedy?"
Surprisingly, the film does have a body count. But the occasional death is hidden beneath a frenetic haze of feather-clad Charleston dancers, motor racers and flapper cocaine-takers. There's also the inexhaustible gossip columnists, who best articulate Fry’s sometimes-testy relationship with the media.
"Anything you do genitally or nasally is bound to come back and bite you on the botty," he says. "Every party you go to, the press is there; and the downside is you don't behave as badly as you would like to."
From the swinging soirees at the start of Bright Young Things to the sobering shadow of fascism that hangs over its final minutes – Oscar Wilde is a continuing presence.
"A feature of the Bright Young Things generation of the ‘20s and ‘30s is that they were the first group to rediscover Wilde," says Fry.
"He had been unspoken between his death in 1900 to the end of World War I in 1918. There was nearly a 20-year period where he was a guilty secret. And he was a guilty secret not just because he was reviled, but because society and the literary world knew that a great injustice had been done - a great tree had been felled. And it was shaming, as there were plenty of people like Henry James and Bernard Shaw who could have done more and didn’t.
"So there was this young generation born around the time Wilde died that sort of rediscovered him. Rediscovered the aesthetic movement that he was so much a symbol of him.
"And at their parties the Bright Young Things generation aped the velvet jackets that he wore."
Fry also used a collection of Wilde-inspired velvet jackets to help him through many tough years at a rugby-obsessed English boarding school.
"After seeing The Importance of Being Earnest, I’d read the standard Wilde biography and learnt his story. And, at the same time, I was becoming aware of my own other-ness. And so the bond was sealed.
"Also, I was at a school dominated by rugby - and a lot of people who didn’t like sport used to skulk around like weeds.
"I didn’t like sport – but I refused to skulk. And Wilde’s life gave me the assurance to take the initiative and be proud of my other-ness. So I’d wear these great velvet coats that I’d buy from second hand shops and tease the rugby players: ‘Did you have a lovely game, darlings?’
"Because pride would not let me be a weed."
Pride continues to loom large in Fry’s life as he flits from film sets to writing novels and newspaper columns. This is a man who refuses to be marginalised as "an actor with a word processor".
"You’re a person not a noun," he says. "You do stuff. If acting is something you enjoy doing – then you do it. But it doesn’t limit or define you."