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The Delaunay, an upscale brasserie in London, sits on a crescent-shaped road called Aldwych, where the West End meets Fleet Street, the city’s historic home for newspapers. Situated at the intersection of entertainment and news, it is the kind of low-key-swank place where celebrities dine but are not disturbed. (You might spot someone famous, but please, let them eat their schnitzel in peace.) That’s good news for Graham Norton, the gregarious Irish chat-show host who is so well-known in the U.K. that the Guardian recently described him as “The Face Welcome in Every Home.” Indeed, he was stopped several times on his way to the restaurant. “I’ve been very famous today,” he said, seeming pleased, and slightly puzzled.
For nearly twenty years, Norton, the U.K.’s chatter-in-chief, has hosted “The Graham Norton Show,” a Friday-night talk show in which celebrities sit opposite him on a red couch and, well, chat. They do not talk politics; they do not philosophize. They chat. Norton likes to chat, and he’s very good at it. Just after arriving, dressed down in a purple plaid shirt, he was full of bonny small talk. He mentioned a piece I’d written and asked how I ended up in London. He wanted to make sure he was pronouncing my name correctly. He told an anecdote about the late architect David Collins, whose studio designed the Delaunay’s interiors. (“Every restaurant you went to, the lighting would drive him crazy!”) Fifteen minutes elapsed before I realized I had not asked him a single question about his new novel, “Frankie,” which was the reason for our meeting. “I always find this so weird,” he said, about being interviewed. “It’s quite an unnatural conversation. Just kind of, like, still talking! Like, if this was a date, it’s going badly. I’m talking too much.”
Getting other people to talk too much is Norton’s superpower. Specifically, other people who are preposterously famous. He has interviewed some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Lady Gaga, Judi Dench, and Robert De Niro. On the day we met, he had recently filmed an episode with Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, Josh Brolin, and Cher. (“Fascinating!”) Part of Norton’s charm—or shtick, depending on your point of view—is that, though his own fame often meets, or exceeds, that of his guests’, he consistently aligns himself with his audience. In person, as on his show, he is genial and self-deprecating, but not sycophantic; a man of the people, who just happens to be really good at talking to celebrities. “Being a chat-show host is quite a confusing job,” Norton told me. “On one level, it’s very high status, in that your name is above the door, and you walk out to thunderous applause. Da Da Da! All high status. But then the minute you get the guests on, it’s low status, because, no matter who they are, it’s your job to elevate them. To make them funnier, more famous, more interesting than they might otherwise be. And I think that’s the bit where some people might be, like, Oh, I thought this would be more about me. So I see myself as, like, their comedy butler.”
There are some key differences between Norton’s show and American late-night shows. First, Norton’s show is decidedly apolitical. (“I try to avoid it completely,” he said.) Second, there’s booze. Guests can request whatever they like, and Norton usually sips from a large wine glass. Unlike Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel, Norton interviews all of his guests—sometimes four or five in an episode—at the same time. (Norton sits in a swivel chair, while the stars crowd together on the sofa.) This all makes for a casual, somewhat giddy atmosphere, like a house party full of unusually attractive people. Like any party, there are competing anecdotes and subtle snubs. There are tangents and off-color stories. Sometimes, people seem drunk. (In an uncomfortable episode, from 2008, Mickey Rourke pulled out a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs and asked Norton to wear them. He did.) At the end of each show, members from the audience get to sit in a big red chair and try to tell an anecdote before Norton, or a guest, pulls a lever that flips them backward. In short, everything is a little messier and a little weirder. As close to human as a chat show can get.
Norton insists that the alcohol isn’t there to loosen people up, but it often does. Guests on his show sometimes seem surprised by the conviviality. (“This is the best time I’ve ever had on a talk show,” Matt Damon once told the audience.) “Here’s my take,” Norton told me. “I’m not going to force a drink on anyone. But, as a host, you know, you are my guest. It’s an indicator, it’s a token, that I intend you to have a nice time.” Norton finds the American propensity to abstain on television odd. He is a devotee of the legendary host Dick Cavett, on whose shows, in the nineteen-sixties and onward, “the female guests are wearing hats, they’ve got gloves on, everyone’s smoking.” There’s a vibe. He went on, emphatically, “I haven’t sat you down with a glass of water that you didn’t want. The ‘Late Night’ with a mug of water—where did that come from? What sort of weird tradition is that? Cup of coffee would be nice.”
The menu at the Delaunay is daunting—goujons of haddock, devilled lamb kidneys, and four types of schnitzel—so we select the prix-fixe lunch. Spatchcock chicken with salsa verde for Norton; mackerel with celeriac remoulade for me. Smoked salmon with bread to start. Norton apologized for not ordering a drink; he had a doctor’s appointment after lunch. A few diners looked our way, but Norton either didn’t notice or wasn’t fazed. His husband of two years, the filmmaker Jono McLeod, is vegan, he said, and they come to the Delaunay in part because of its vegan menu. “Which you don’t expect of somewhere with, you know, wood panelling.”
Norton has been in the public eye for so long that it can be hard to keep track of his output. He has been an “agony uncle” for the Daily Telegraph, a commentator on the Eurovision Song Contest, and a judge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.” For many years, he had a radio show, where he would offer people advice. When he turned fifty, he took stock of his life, and decided he wanted to try writing fiction. “I think there’s a danger when you reach ages like that, you kind of think, Oh, I’ll just sort of coast now. It’s all downhill now. So I thought it was good to keep challenging myself,” he said. He published his début novel at fifty-three. (“It felt good to be a début something at that age.”) Now sixty-one, he has written two memoirs and five novels in total, the latest of which, “Frankie,” became a best-seller in the U.K. in September, and will be released in January in the U.S. Still, he’s casually dismissive of his fiction. “Lena Dunham has a thing about her painting, that it’s a credible hobby. I would call these books a credible hobby,” he said. He doesn’t promote them on his show (“The BBC would lose its mind”) and believes most people don’t know about them. “When I go out into the studio to do the talk show, I would say ninety per cent of people in that audience don’t know I write books,” he said. “Most people don’t read books. Luckily there are a lot of people.”
“Frankie” is a sweeping historical novel that follows the life of Frances Howe, a woman born in a provincial town in postwar Ireland who ends up, through a series of mishaps, in nineteen-sixties New York City. Near the end of her life, she has settled in an art-filled apartment along the Thames in Wapping, London. This is where we meet Damian, a young Irish caretaker, who has come to help Frankie. Initially prickly—she will hardly let Damian fix her tea—Frankie soon warms up and begins to tell Damian her life story. Her history unfolds through flashbacks, with the narrative flipping between her adventurous past and her little home in Wapping. We see Frankie as a lonely child who has lost her parents, then as a young woman trapped in a bad marriage, and, later, as a successful chef and the partner of a rising art-world star.
In Manhattan, Frankie encounters several characters based on real people, including Tim White, the eccentric English author, and Leo Castelli, the gallerist who exhibited Andy Warhol. Norton makes these sketches gleefully; his delight in the detail is evident. White, with his “thick beard yellowed around the mouth by cigarette smoke,” makes Frankie feel “like a native New Yorker in comparison.” “Despite the oppressive heat outside, his jacket was brown tweed, and he was already holding a large glass of red wine,” Norton writes. As the years pass, Frankie’s life runs up against the AIDS epidemic. She watches the waiters in her restaurant fall sick. Writing these scenes, “the emotion of it really kind of took me aback,” Norton said. He was in London when the disease arrived in the U.K., and writes in his memoir about losing friends. At the same time, he wanted to get across in the novel that “it wasn’t everything.” “People didn’t just sit down and wait for the AIDS crisis to be over,” he said. “It was something Frankie lived through.”
Like Frankie, Norton grew up Protestant in southern Ireland but made his fortune elsewhere. His mother was a homemaker, and his father was a sales rep for Guinness Brewery. As a child, he loved dressing up. “We have photographs at home of people coming over to the house and I’m there with, like, a doily on my head, with two of my mother’s aprons tied around to make a skirt,” he said. When Norton was four, and it was time to go to school, his mother sat him down and gave him some advice. “It must be so terrifying,” he said. “Sending this really femme little boy, this camp little creature. You’d imagine he’d just be beaten into a pulp, and that didn’t happen.” His mother told him, “If people pick on you, don’t react,” he said. “I don’t know what it does for your emotional development, but it certainly stops people bullying you!” His eyes had turned misty at the memory of his mother’s words. I said his emotions seemed close to the surface. “I’m crying over lunch without a drink!” he said. “What gave it away?”
Norton left Ireland when he was in his twenties. “I kind of wanted to reinvent myself, and I felt I couldn’t do that in Ireland,” he said. After a stint at a hippie commune in San Francisco, he moved to London, where he did standup and worked as a waiter. At parties, he dreaded seeing other Irish people. “I’d avoid them, because I knew they knew me,” he said. That has changed with time. He has an affinity for Irish actors who come to the show. (His house in Cork is not far from Saoirse Ronan’s and Paul Mescal’s.) When an Irish guest comes on, “there’s a difference because we know each other. We see each other,” he said. Bumping into an Irish person at a party now is “the nicest feeling in the world, because we have that shared history,” he told me. “It’s such a small island and the references we have are so specific.”
There are some parallels between Norton and Damian, Frankie’s caretaker. Besides the obvious—Irish, gay—they are both invested in coaxing stories out of others. Norton has a team of researchers who look for anecdotes that might link guests with one another. “If two or three people have a known story, then all you need to do is a ‘fish’ to the others. You know, you just throw a question and see what happens. You might catch something.” What makes for a bad guest? “Blocky” stars, who don’t say much, or “if you’re just looking at yourself on the monitor and waiting for me to say your name again.” (Some guests are odd in retrospect. Harvey Weinstein once told a long story about finding an errant sex scene in the screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.”) The guests that shine are the ones who are “engaged in other people,” Norton said. The audience wants to watch Julia Roberts fangirling over Cher. “Those are my favorite nights, when the couch kind of takes off and I’m just literally sat there.”
Growing up, Norton admired the Irish talk-show host Gay Byrne, who presented “The Late Late Show with Gay Byrne” until 1999. “The absolute best,” Norton said. He told a story. Once, Byrne called a viewer to tell them they had won a car, only to be told that the winner’s child had recently died in a car accident. “Most broadcasters, their instinct would be, ‘Sorry for your loss, bye!’ ” Norton said. But no! “Gay kept on the phone and had this beautiful conversation.” A nun said a few words. A poet read a poem. “It’s very Irish, in that there’s a kind of village-pub element to it,” Norton said. His eyes were welling up again.
Our plates had been cleared. Norton’s coffee arrived on a silver tray with a piece of chocolate. When I asked, he told me that a good chat-show anecdote should be three things: funny, short, and self-deprecating. Our lunch had been two of those—we had been talking for nearly three hours. Norton showed no signs of flagging. “If, somehow, you’ve made a fool of yourself in the story, then that will make the audience like you, as well as laugh,” he said, before leaving. “So it’s win-win.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
