The air of madness in Michael Holroyd’s study is so charmingly baroque it must be contrived. Every surface is strewn with papers; two wicker armchairs have come to rest, like driftwood, near the desk; there is a sock by a table leg; and, among the clutter on the polished floorboards, a couple of cardboard boxes contain a handful of birth certificates, property deeds and albums of sepia-toned photographs. These are his family relics, the meagre detritus of three generations of turbulence and wilful eccentricity. As the sum of source material for Holroyd’s next book, the first draft of which he aims to complete this week, the contents of these boxes look unpromising. The caption under one Victorian group portrait doesn’t even name the sitters, just the dog: Spot. This is why the book is part autobiography, part saga about the declining fortunes of Holroyd’s once wealthy, tea plantation-owning family, and part investigative journalism.
The contrast with the subjects of Holroyd’s previous endeavours – especially the biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw – could not be greater. These three lives, consisting of nine volumes in total, represent 37 years of the author’s own life – if you include the past few years, spent abridging them to just three volumes (to be published next week, for the first time, as a complete set in paperback). For each, the research material came not so much in a brace of cardboard boxes as a fleet of skips.
During the 17 years, for instance, that Holroyd worked on his monumental, five-volume life of Shaw, the floorboards in this book-lined study at the top of his Ladbroke Grove house creaked under the weight of Shavian letters, manuscripts and diaries. Open a cupboard or drawer, manhandle a desk or chair and there would have been an avalanche of dog-eared prefaces, pamphlets and plays. The bearded superman wrote ten letters every day, more than 50 plays, and filled 40 volumes with his collected works (and more with his uncollected writings). With his shorthand and his secretaries, GBS could write in a day more words than Holroyd could read in a day.
The sheaves of paper scattered around Holroyd’s portable typewriter today relate mostly to the various literary committees he sits on in order to get himself out of the house. ‘I could stay closeted in this chaotic room quite amiably if I wasn’t forced to go out,’ he says. And while there is still an atmosphere of musty neglect in the room, which has you brushing away imaginary cobwebs before you sit down, there is no sense of Shaw’s presence any more, the vast archive having been returned to the various universities and literary estates from which it came.
Having the Shaw papers lying around the place was an important part of the writing process, apparently. By handling them, noting the crossings out, even smelling the mildew on them, Holroyd believes he established a sense of intimacy with his subject. ‘When it comes to my own family there is very little to go on,’ says Holroyd with a sigh. ‘Things were suppressed. The waters of oblivion quickly closed over the family scandals.’ The secrecy had a lot to do with his father being a bankrupt, with his parents having notched up five marriages between them and with the shame they felt in being unable to bring up their son – the boy Michael was raised in an atmosphere of glum gentility by his paternal grandparents in Maidenhead, Berkshire.
‘But I’m discovering new clues about them every day,’ Holroyd adds. ‘A will might have a bit of narrative. A trip to Somerset House might provide some embers that you can blow on to get a flame going. And I do have a degree of latitude because I know the tones of voice, the habitual phrases, the mannerisms.’ Hesitation. Thoughtful pursing of the lips. ‘This book is autobiographical only to the extent that I appear as echoes and reflections of what went on. I remember, for instance, overhearing my grandfather groaning, ‘What are we going to do about the boy!’ But the irony was that, with time, it was me asking the question, ‘What am I do with my father, with my aunt?”
The book, to be published early next year, will be called Basil Street Blues, after the street in London where Holroyd was conceived, where his mother modelled and where his father – who happened to be called Basil – had a business importing Lalique glass. As well as his memories and a handful of photographs to go on, Holroyd also has his own reflection in the mirror for inspiration. ‘You become the people who are missing,’ he says. Today Holroyd sits in a rumpled blue matelot jumper, half-rimmed spectacles on a cord around his neck and slippers embroidered with an anonymous coat of arms. He coils his legs each around the other, as if making himself smaller – and there is something of the chameleon about him, as if he is blending with his surroundings to avoid detection. His dusty brown hair is dishevelled, as though he has just risen from one of the siestas he lists as his recreation in Who’s Who (the English, as No‘l Coward noted, may detest a siesta – but Holroyd, born in London in 1935, is part Irish and half-Swedish, so he can nap whenever he likes). Holroyd’s downturned eyes, though small, tired-looking and watery, seem kindly and wise. His facial expressions, too, have a certain crinkly warmth. Occasionally they are accompanied by a gentle wheezy chortle. For he is very much a chortler – giving him the aspect of one of those avuncular bumbling characters you come across in Dickens.
As Holroyd rises from one of the wicker chairs, it complains with a creak. He rummages around in the nearest box, produces a photograph of his mother, Ulla, considers it for a moment and hands it over. Her face is handsome, her expression blank. ‘Blankly Swedish,’ Holroyd agrees. ‘She was an eyeful. She knew how to enjoy herself.’ An extrovert, multilingual au pair with a penchant for parties, she was only 19 when she gave birth to her son and rather resented the intrusion. Holroyd’s most vivid memory of his mother is of seeing her dancing on the table after dinner, champagne in hand, talking in tongues. By then she was 37, he a shy, self-conscious and painfully embarrassed 17.
Holroyd’s parents, who were unable even to agree on the exact date their son was born – his mother swore it was 27 August, his father said the 29th – divorced in 1944. ‘They would marry from time to time and hardly a holiday went by when I wasn’t supplied with a new step-parent or stepbrother and stepsister,’ Holroyd recalls with the studied nonchalance of the raconteur. ‘As my mother was Swedish, and I had a stepmother who was French and a stepfather who was Hungarian, I was considered an object of curiosity at school.’ He would try to drain himself of interest, keep quiet, make himself as inconspicuous as possible. ‘My childhood wasn’t as exotic as it sounded because I would often find myself in countries where I didn’t speak the language or understand the culture. This would just make me feel lonely.’
His father was a proud man who couldn’t cope with the shame of losing the fortune left to him by his own father, a major-general who had served in India and been given a tea plantation as a reward for action in the Mutiny. Holroyd recalls an almost tangible sense of nervousness in the family home. ‘Whenever someone knocked on the door we wouldn’t answer it. We absolutely froze.’ He gives the wheezy chortle. ‘Anything that came, a telegram or whatever, would, we now believed, be bad news. We had become pessimists. But what we dreaded most was people’s sympathy.’ He recalls playing tennis on a court belonging to a woman his aunt had known in better times. ‘We would creep up to the court, hiding behind trees so we wouldn’t be seen from the big house and offered hospitality.’
Despite his father’s bankruptcy, money was found to send Michael to Eton. ‘It was ridiculous. I now discover we had a double mortgage on the house and my father had gone to my stepfather, who we’d never met before, and asked him to pay for some of the school fees. He never mentioned it.’ Father and son were never especially close, and the only time words of reconciliation were uttered between them was when Basil was so old and deaf Michael had to bellow them out – which rather ruined the effect.
After an unimpressive career at school, Michael Holroyd was coerced by his father into training as a lawyer and articled to a depressing office on the bus route between Dedworth and Gravesend. Here, Holroyd discovered a talent for amiable inertia and the dullness of the job was only broken on two occasions: the time he was shot at while serving a writ, and the day he was accidentally locked into a butcher’s fridge.
In 1955 National Service offered Holroyd a means of escape from the legal profession but, because of his enthusiasm for inactivity, he was reluctant to seize it: in his medical he claimed everything from water on the knee to bow-legs and an allergy to Elastoplast. Disaster.  He was graded ‘3’, ensuring not exemption but two years in the Pioneer Corps, digging field latrines. He appealed for clemency and was re-graded ‘1’.
In the army, he says, he learnt the art of partially eclipsing himself, not going missing exactly but always going unseen. He would strut around with an expression of the sternest vacancy so that it became difficult to focus on him. No one was even sure what his name was. He was once standing in the middle of his barracks when a sergeant looked in, said ‘No one here,’ and left. Holroyd considered it a triumph. Eventually someone came across his records and noticed his mother was a native of Sweden, a neutral country. He was confined to barracks for several weeks, before drifting back into anonymity.
Holroyd grins at the memory. Perhaps more than he realises, he is given to using comedy as a way of diffusing – denying even – the family situations he recalls. ‘In retrospect humiliating events can seem funny,’ he says. ‘Especially when it comes to my family. There is a tragi-comic theme to my parents. I mean, we were ridiculous.’
One consequence of his unorthodox, displaced upbringing is that, as an adult, he seems excessively driven by a need to be liked. We all are to an extent, but his urge is so powerful it has won him a reputation for niceness that even Michael Palin would find unpalatable. After several hours’ conversation, I came away with an impression of bluff geniality. But if you weren’t in the right mood for it, his manner could seem ingratiating and emollient, his stories overly polished and a little smug. Indeed, his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble, once said to him on an airplane that looked like it was about to be hijacked, ‘Please don’t try to disarm them with your British Council lecture, dear.’
In his biographies Michael Holroyd has always striven to feel sympathetic toward his subjects, but not sentimental. He is, he says, aware of the dangers of reducing painful episodes in his own life to twee jokes.  ‘I’m trying to guard against it. Some scenes do get to me. Once I was standing over my aunt’s bed shouting at her. Not very pleasant. She was paralysed and yet refused to leave her huge five-bedroom house, which she, we, couldn’t afford to keep, and move into a smaller flat adapted for a disabled person. I felt stressed. I felt angry. But my aunt’s position was that she would rather die in one place than live in another. It was an impossible situation. But I was forced to make her move.’
In his teens and early twenties, Holroyd was, he says, in a permanent state of apprehension. He turned to writing biographies so that he could escape into other people’s lives. ‘I think it was a way of dealing with it. He wrote his first biography, of the writer and critic Hugh Kingsmill, at the age of 23. His two-volume life of Strachey was published to acclaim in 1967 and 1968, and his equally successful Augustus John in 1974 and 1975.  Shaw was published between 1988 and 1992.
And as Holroyd played a part in the posthumous reputations of Strachey, John and Shaw, so they have played a part in his actual life. Like a method biographer, getting under the skin, Holroyd became infected with many of the ailments Strachey described in his plaintive correspondence – faulty digestion, apathy and self-loathing. He also found himself becoming more liberal, dry and bohemian in outlook the more he came under Strachey’s spell. Being pathologically nice and well-mannered, he secretly wished he were more brittle and rude, like Strachey. Being shy with women as a young man (he says he could never speak when his beautiful 19-year-old half-sister was in the room), he wished he were more sexually confident, like the swashbuckling, womanising John. When Holroyd researched John, he found himself becoming more hedonistic, cheerful and visually aware as well as more flirtatious. Shaw made him more confident and politically robust.
Holroyd himself would disapprove of such reductionism. Then again, his own conclusions can seem too neat at times: the defining characteristic of Shaw, he argues, was that he was governed by the child within. John’s was that he tried to kill his intellect through alcohol because it tortured him; Strachey’s that his acid wit and misanthropy stemmed from his homosexuality. When it was published in the Sixties, Lytton Strachey broke new ground – and caused a scandal – in its detailed and dispassionate account of Strachey’s sexual proclivities in particular and those of the Bloomsbury Group in general. Perhaps what shocked the Establishment most was that its author seemed to empathise.
‘Of course I’d been to public school and so had some knowledge of homosexuality as a way of life. It had very much been in the atmosphere and there had been rumours and frissons and there may have been the odd expulsion. I think we all had innocent crushes. I certainly had one. The point about being invisible as a biographer is that you don’t intrude or obtrude in the text: ticking people off for this, commending them for that. You have to go with the current of energy. Homosexuality was extremely important to Strachey. I found it difficult at the start to get into step with him. Took about a year of reading his letters and diaries.’
Not that Holroyd became too sympathetic. He is resolutely, if shyly at first, heterosexual. ‘Having been in all these male-dominated institutions I found dating agony. I was very glad when the Sixties got going and a lot of women became ‘manisers’ and said, ‘For God’s sake, take some initiative.’ I made up for lost time. With one exception I don’t think anyone got hurt. On the whole I’ve stayed friends with people I’ve been involved with.’ When asked how many times he fell in love he says, ‘a good six or more.’ Several days later he rings to correct this figure to three or four: ‘Sorry to be pedantic about this, let’s say three and a half.’
In 1982, Holroyd gave driving lessons to his friend, the novelist Margaret Drabble, and these became a form of courtship which resulted in an unconventional marriage. For 13 years they were known as the couple who lived apart to stay together. Her home was in Hampstead, his in the bottom half of the five-storey house off Ladbroke Grove. ‘We found ingenious ways of getting to each other’s houses by car, shaving a couple of minutes off here and there.’
Drabble said they were so polite and so hated using the phone that they would write each other postcards saying, ‘Would you be free for dinner tomorrow?’ When the top half of Holroyd’s house came on the market, it so happened Drabble had just finished her Oxford Companion to English Literature as well as her biography of Angus Wilson. ‘There seemed no point in her rattling around on her own in her house. This’ – he spreads his hands – ‘is really two offices and a home. Can you hear her now?’ Silence. ‘And Maggie can’t hear me.’
It is quite a double act; a my-wife-next-door sitcom. It is Drabble, a brisk Yorkshirewoman with a pageboy haircut, who answers the front door when you arrive – because her book-lined study is on the ground floor. She hands you over to Holroyd who is hovering at the top of the first flight of stairs and then melts back into the shadows of her study. Before marrying Holroyd, Drabble was married for 15 years to the actor Clive Swift with whom she had three children. Holroyd gets on well with them and says he has no regrets about not having children of his own. ‘It wasn’t something I planned. It’s not something that worried me. I’m not against children. I don’t go around Heroding. My creative energies have gone into my books and maybe I would be less affected by reviews if I had three children squabbling around my ankles. Do I fear death more because I don’t have the sort of immortality provided by children? Maybe. But it may also be because my mother and grandfather both had terrible, protracted deaths. I try not to think about death. The curtain will go down, I tell myself, and everything will be all right. I see my biographical work as offering a chance to retrieve a little from death. Giving the people I write about a chance to carry on.’
Michael Holroyd’s muscular, wry and elegantly written biographies give him a pretty good claim on literary immortality. It is possible that the definitive Shaw has yet to be written, but probable that any future biographer who feels tempted to try writing it will first sleep on it, wake to a balmy spring morning filled with the song of skylarks and say to himself, ‘Oh sod it, life’s too short.’
And this is probably why, despite his best efforts to seem self-effacing, vague and socially inept, Michael Holroyd is actually rather pleased with himself. But there are chinks in his armour of self-satisfaction. What if, in devoting his own life to studying – indeed vicariously living – the lives of others, Holroyd wakes up one morning with the horrible feeling that he might have somehow neglected to live his own? Is this why he has now turned the pen on himself? ‘It’s true, when writing Shaw I worried desperately that my life was disappearing. I kept lying to myself about how long it would take. And I was worried that I was making a complete ass of myself. Am I, I wondered, running this marathon having taken a wrong turn somewhere? I sometimes had to tear up 50 pages because it didn’t lead anywhere. I worried that I might die before it was finished; that the house and with it the only copy of the manuscript might go up in flames.’
An even more uncomfortable thought occurs. On his deathbed, Holroyd might suddenly come round to the view, held by some, that biography is fundamentally immoral, and that biographers – people Oscar Wilde called the bodysnatchers of literature – have no right to the intimate secrets of someone else’s life. How would Holroyd himself like it if he knew someone would be poring over his personal effects once he was gone? ‘I wouldn’t like it one bit. I wouldn’t wish a biography of me to be written while I was alive. I discriminate between the rights of the living and the dead – that is my ethical position as a biographer and I can’t exclude myself from it. When we’re living we need all our sentimentalities, our evasions, our half-truths and our white lies, to get through life. My family certainly did. I do. When we are dead different rules apply. You can sometimes ask the dead to contribute a little more to the living world than when they were alive – because they will no longer be hurt. It’s funny, you can sometimes find out more about someone’s life than they themselves knew. You read the lovers’ diaries that they never saw and you find out why love affairs really ended.’
The death of his parents left a gaping hole in Holroyd’s life. So did the completion of the final volume of Shaw. It’s safe to assume the collected works published next week will, too. The autobiography he is writing is, he acknowledges with a sanguine smile, an attempt to plug these gaps. He makes light of it. But metaphysical terror lies behind the affable weariness in his smile. And if the air of charming madness in his study seems contrived, the sense of mortal panic in his eyes does not.

Perhaps it’s the pain that blurs and distorts Matt Le Blanc’s appearance. Perhaps it’s the painkillers. Either way, he’s pretty much unrecognisable as he slouches into the dimly lit bar in Beverly Hills. No big entrance, no swagger, no boyish grin in camera-conscious three-quarter profile. Instead, that firm jaw-line is diffused by a week’s stubble, and the leather jacket he’s wearing makes his shoulders look rounded, his physique stocky. I squint uncertainly and give him one of those vague hand signals that can be turned into a stretch and a yawn if identity proves mistaken. He sits down at my table, orders a Stoli with soda and lime, sinks it and signals the waiter over for a second one. He’s just come from the gym, he explains in a voice so soft and low against the background chatter, I have to lip-read to get the gist. He dislocated his shoulder while doing laterals. ‘If you move a millimetre, it kills you,’ he mouths slowly. ‘The pain is so bad you get light-headed.’
It’s the eighth time this has happened since his shoulder bone first parted company with its socket during a rehearsal for Friends. Matthew Perry collided with Matt Le Blanc when – as Chandler and Joey – they were racing to occupy the same chair. For the following half a dozen episodes, while Le Blanc was in a sling, the injury had to be incorporated into the script.
At first, as we sit and talk, the actor is subdued and earnest, fixing me unblinkingly with eyes that seem 96 per cent pupil, four per cent iris. This keeps distracting my eyes from their lip-reading duties and, as a consequence, our conversation becomes stilted. The thought bubbles above Le Blanc’s head are reading: ‘Jeez…stuck with…goddam English stuffed shirt…keeps looking from my eyes to my mouth like a moron…’
He orders another vodka. Along with the five Advils he’s already taken, this relaxes him enough to bare a broad smile that features teeth so impossibly white and even I find myself involuntarily covering my own mouth with my hand as I smile back. To compound this, I’m veering between feelings of paranoia that I’m the dullest person he’s ever met, and, as I get better at deciphering his mumbled words, mounting panic that it might be the other way round.
Without the sharp, deadpan one-liners the Friends scriptwriters put into his mouth, Le Blanc has all the social buoyancy and grace of a seal out of water. Still cute, still in possession of the big, sleepy brown eyes but now clumsy and inelegant with it. I order another beer. Telepathically, we have agreed that the best way for both of us to survive this evening is to get steadily drunk.
Later at the restaurant, we are led to a table in the middle of the room and Le Blanc requests that we be moved to one in the corner where he can have his back to the other diners. ‘I used to enjoy eating out,’ he says, and then loses the train of thought. He munches on a bread stick and furrows his brow as he studies the menu for about 40 minutes. ‘Yeah, I used to enjoy people-watching,’ he says, suddenly returning to his subject and making me jump. ‘Now I can’t do that any more because people just end up watching me, do you know what I mean?’
I’m about to tell him I know exactly what he means because, the previous year, I had sat a few tables away from him and the rest of the cast from Friends, in a restaurant not far from here and – ha ha ha – I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off them. Luckily I don’t get the chance before he adds, ‘And I hate that. No, I don’t hate that, because it has made me financially comfortable. New house and car for mom and a new smile on my face. It’s made me feel like Elvis.’ He says that he is not very good at ‘this whole celebrity thing’. You can see why: jealous men are want to approach him in bars and punch him for no reason. And he is constantly harassed by predatory women. ‘It’s not that it makes you feel vulnerable. Just unreal. Being stared at all the time. There was this one girl, 13 or 14-years-old, and she just gaped at me, then started shaking. I freaked out because I didn’t know what to do. I felt really guilty because it was like she was so overwhelmed she didn’t know how to react. The trouble is, people have an imaginary relationship with you, especially when they see you on television. It’s more intimate than the cinema. You see in their house and often they are watching you in bed, you know?’
Although in recent years Matt Le Blanc’s name has been romantically linked with his manager, Camile Cerio, Goldie Hawn’s then 16-year-old daughter, Kate Hudson; porn star Jenn Jameson; Playboy model Tonya Poole; Minnie Driver; Jennifer Aniston and Amanda de Cadenet, the actor doesn’t have a steady girlfriend at the moment. ‘Now I’m 30, though, I suppose I’m thinking about marriage,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I think, yeah, that’s what I want – but you can’t look for it. It’s got to find you. I saw this girl one time on the freeway and she saw me and we both pulled over and ended up going out for a year.’
Not all his assignations are so charming. When dining at a Hollywood restaurant with some caddish companions, he took a female admirer off to the washroom after being introduced to her just 15 minutes earlier. He came back to his table grinning and soaking up the laddish applause and then all but ignored his latest conquest for the rest of the evening before leaving without saying goodbye to her.
‘It’s difficult with girlfriends,’ he says ploddingly, in his barely audible bass, ‘because I will go to a premiere and when I get home she asks, “What’s the matter?” and I say, “I just signed a hundred autographs” and she doesn’t know how I feel about that. That’s why a lot of actors end up going out with actresses. I don’t know what she wants me to say, “I’m a freak?” My shoulder hurts, I feel mortal. Yet I have people screaming at me and I think, “What’s real and what’s not real?”’
A fine example of this state of unreality could be witnessed on a visit he made to London in April. He was with the cast of Friends, filming an hour-long special which included a chance meeting with the Duchess of York. Friends-mania ensued, with British fans following the cast everywhere, waiting at the airport, and camping outside their hotel.
Refreshingly, Le Blanc is under no illusion that he is adored by his female fans simply for his acting ability. His foppish black hair, bee-strung lips and wing-mirror cheekbones also enter into the equation. Much to his chagrin, the same features seem to appeal to men, too – which is why this high-testosterone, all-American heterosexual has become a gay icon. A photo of him even appeared on the cover of Spartacus: International Gay Guide for Men. He went to court to stop further copies being printed. It has since become a collector’s item.
This said, there is no denying his gifts as a comic actor. His timing and delivery are good. But his theorising about them is less so. In an eerie echo of the sort of cool and opaque self-analysis you would associate with his new best friend the Dunchess of York, he says of his acting technique that it’s really just a matter of thinking of himself as a dozen eggs. To do Friends he takes eggs two, four, six and eight. To do something different, maybe he would use eggs one, three, seven, nine and twelve.
Presumably for his first starring role in a $90 million Hollywood film, he has utilised eggs five, ten and eleven. In Lost in Space, which opens this summer and co-stars William Hurt, he plays the hero, a clever, ruthless engineer who saves the spaceship from the on-board psychopath, played by Gary Oldman. He says that he is surprised to find himself being cast in such a major film, alongside such distinguished actors, but he can at least relate to Gary Oldman in terms of his wild, hard-drinking life as well as the hardship of his upbringing. Matt Le Blanc was an only child brought up by his divorced mother, Pat Grossman, who worked in a factory making circuit boards. The young Matt knew that his father had gone to Vietnam but had been too frightened to ask his mother whether or not he had been killed there – because she made it clear she did not want to talk about him. ‘Ours was a blue-collar, Italian-American household in Newton, Massachusetts,’ he says. ‘I met my father when I was eight. Ran down the stairs and there was this guy wearing army fatigues with long hair. He looked like Jesus Christ and I could see Le Blanc on his shirt. But he never came home to stay and my mother remarried. Am I in touch with him? Yes and no. It’s a sore issue though, and I don’t really want to talk about it. The way I am is because of my mom, not my dad. She was there always, always, always.’
Le Blanc’s first job was a paper round, then he stacked shelves in a convenience store and worked in a burger bar. He had, he says, no real ambitions. He enrolled on a construction and technology course only to drop out of it soon after. He never studied at drama school but was spotted one day in the street by a woman and asked to try modelling. This lead to him appearing in a series of high-profile TV commercials for Heinz ketchup, Coca Cola and, most notably, as the Levi’s 501 man. His attempts to get into acting were less smooth. He spent a year in New York looking for work and even had to sell his furniture to pay for food. ‘I kept looking at other actors and saying, ‘What’s he got that I ain’t got? Some fancy drama-school diploma? I know I will never be the best actor in the world. But then, I don’t see it as a race to the top.’ Eventually he landed some small parts in soaps and sitcoms, and then in 1994 came the big one, Friends, which soon went to number one in the ratings in Britain and America.
While most American television comedies are pitiful and cringe-making, over the years a handful have been outstandingly well-honed: M+A+S+H, Taxi, Cheers and Frasier. Friends, with its crisp metropolitan humour, is in this category. And as the self-obsessed, dim-witted but amiable womaniser Joey Trebbiani, Matt le Blanc gets some corking lines. ‘Do you know what blows my mind?’ he’ll muse. ‘Women can see their breasts any time they want. How they get any work done is beyond me.’ Or when giving advice on dating he will say, ‘Why do you have to break up with her? Be a man and just stop phoning.’
In terms of delivery, of course, it helps that in real life Matt Le Blanc himself seems to be a self-obsessed, dim-witted but amiable womaniser. I had heard reports of his reputation as being the moody one among the cast of Friends and of his prima donna-ish behaviour, but there is none of that this evening, and when the conversation turns to his favourite pastime – snowboarding – he seems positively animated. Any dangerous sport will do, in fact. He collects fast cars and motorbikes and says, ‘I’m an adrenaline junkie. Love speed. I ski-dived – ski-dove? – as well. It’s like banging your head against a wall just because it feels so good when you stop.’ He pauses, ‘God, I’ve had a brain failure, where was I going with that thought? Oh, here we go; afterwards it’s so life-affirming. ‘Oh man, you think. I’m still alive. Wow!”
The restaurant is on the ground floor of the Four Seasons, the hotel where my wife and I are staying. She has declined my suggestion that she join us for a drink after dinner because she thinks Le Blanc will think that she, like every red-blooded female, must be desperate to meet him – and she does not carry out her threat to approach us at the bar, pretend not to know me, turn her back on Le Blanc and chat me up. We are joined instead after dinner, by a female friend of Le Blanc, who is also a friend of Kirstie Alley, and by one of his snowboarding chums – who has the obligatory permatan, dazzling white teeth and chiselled jaw. A lissom young woman with dyed blond hair and a spray-on skirt approaches and introduces herself to Le Blanc. He says hello rather curtly and then turns back to his friend to continue their analysis of a recent snowboard jump they have done. Another woman, almost identical, approaches and says that she cannot believe it is him and that if she had known he would be here tonight she would have worn more make-up. Ignored she goes away and another, with long black hair this time, approaches, giggles flirtatiously, and says she is called Melody or Misty, or one of those Californian names. She hangs around for a few seconds, ignoring Le Blanc’s peeved expressions, and says that she is sitting at a table in the corner if he fancies company later. Over the next hour or so about half a dozen more long-limbed women do the same thing.
Good grief.
In January, a law was passed in California banning smoking in restaurants and bars. Le Blanc and his chum head for the French windows that lead out on to a garden to have a smoke. Two skeletal pouting blondes appear from nowhere and make for the door with such indecent haste that the fronds on a nearby rubber plant bend over in their slipstream. I watch their body language as they ask Le Blanc for a light. It’s not subtle. I assume that this is the last I will see of the actor. But small talk over, cigarettes stubbed out, he and his friend mosey back over. I ask what he thought of the girls who had followed him out. He shakes his head wearily and sighs, ‘They’re not exactly rocket scientists.’
Well, I suppose by his standards the night is young. They are about to head off to hear a guitarist they know play in a nearby club. Kirstie Alley is going to be there, apparently. I’m welcome to join them, to discuss the latest developments in Space Shuttle heat-shield technology, presumably. I thank them awfully, yawn conspicuously, look at my watch and, like a goddam English stuffed shirt decline.