Other times he talks of his own instinctive need to know, the way - when he was really flying - his eyes would flick around a television studio, obsessively watching every movement, every reaction. 'I pick it up, I need to know immediately, I want to know what's going on. You have to have eyes in the back of your head. But people don't: that's why they get mugged.'
He also speaks of how much he didn't know as the deprived child of a drunken, gambling father in Bermondsey. 'We had a television when we could afford it. We rented it from DER. Once, some kids at school were talking about some programme on this new BBC2. I didn't know what they were talking about. I bluffed.'
Or: 'I didn't know shows went on; I didn't know there were theatres.'What the tabloid harpies don't know about him, what he had to know to be a performer, what he didn't know as a childÉ Barrymore is in a perpetual state of epistemological flux. Of course, he wouldn't know what that meant. He left school at 15 without a single O-level. If he'd carried on with his education, he says he would have studied business. But he should have done philosophy. It might have soothed his raging need to know and be known. Even I'm a problem. He's been staring at me with unusual intensity as we talk.
'I know you from somewhere,' he says suddenly and slightly threateningly. We did meet once at LWT, but neither of us can remember the occasion. And I was sitting a few feet away from him at Princess Diana's funeral in Westminster Abbey. But he was sobbing uncontrollably at the time, so he's unlikely to have noticed anything very much. This does not satisfy him, he wants to know more, but I can't help him.
Can anyone? Can anyone help Barrymore, the great fallen angel of prime-time TV? Once, he was the compere, master of ceremonies, comedian, clown and official cheerer-upper of the nation. Then, first, word slipped out about the drinking, then the drugs, then he was a closet gay, then he was out, then his marriage fell apart. He binged the nights away and collapsed in embarrassing heaps at awards ceremonies. Then, on March 31, 2001, 31-year-old Lubbock was found floating face down in the pool of Barrymore's Essex house at the end of a long evening of revelry. Later the body was found to have massive anal injuries.
The fall from grace was cataclysmic, Luciferian. The drink and the gayness could have been tolerated in a family entertainer, maybe even the drugs. That, people would have shrugged, is show business. But not this; this just looked too awful. Barrymore-Lucifer plummeted hellwards while the choirs of tabloid harpies screeched and cackled. No more television, nothing - he had vanished from the light-ent radar as suddenly as a crashing airliner. BBC Books even put his autobiography, Running away from Myself, on hold. He had become too hot to handle. He still is. When this magazine asked the usual sources if they would lend clothes for a photo shoot with Barrymore, they all refused. He brought his own - which, it has to be said, were as ritzy as anything we could have borrowed.
Anyway, here I am, on a dank day almost two years after Lubbock's death, standing by a roundabout just outside the M25 looking for a silver-grey Mercedes driven by Mike Brown, Barrymore's manager. Brown had said he'd meet me here because the house is too hard to find. His client wants to talk. He's been dry - no drink, no drugs - for 22 months. He's been going almost daily to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Most importantly, he wants to get the truth out about those injuries to Lubbock.
Brown's silver E-Class appears. He's a 'bloke', bald, burly, laid-back. He's super-amiable, but looks as though he could handle himself. He's been with Barrymore for ever. 'I love him. Well, insofar as a straight family man can love a gay man,' he says.
He also starts talking about the size of Lubbock's anus after the injuries, explaining the Barrymore case. There is some detail about blood - or, rather, lack of it - on boxer shorts. Brown apologises for putting our meeting back an hour and a half. He and Barrymore had had to go down to the local police station. Another boy had made allegations of sexual assault. It's routine. Ever since his fall from grace, every con artist and opportunist has tried to make money out of Barrymore. They go to the tabloids, then the police. Barrymore is questioned. The story falls down. That's how hot it is in hell.
Brown's right: I'd never have found the house. It's buried deep in the uneasy and unlovely mix of farmland and suburbia that forms the Essex-Hertfordshire borders. This is the bungalow that Barrymore shared with his wife, Cheryl, and then sold, but which he then, weirdly, bought back. It is also the bungalow made famous by all those helicopter shots after Lubbock's death. But those shots made it look like a spread, a Texan ranch. In fact, it is in a rather cramped corner of a wealthy private estate. The big gates are glamorously electric, but the house itself is nothing special, rather dreary in fact. As we pull into the drive I see Barrymore glance at us, then vanish through the front door. It's like seeing a ghost.
Inside is a designer's nightmare, though it does at least signal the fact that Barrymore once made an awful lot of money. There's a motorbike as sculpture in the hall and a big, hideous angel. There are also some of those toy metal cars that toddlers used to pedal. In the lounge, there are two big chunks of art-deco furniture, a baby grand piano, a tall metal model of the Empire State Building, a Bang & Olufsen stereo and a vast collection of lurid glassware. A couple of old cameras - Mamiya and Rolleiflex - sit on top of the television. Seeking some peace for my eyes, I glance out of the window at the grey winter light. And there is the swimming pool, covered now.Barrymore is talking to Brown in the kitchen. There are two dogs - a quiet, anxious-looking jack russell called J D after Jack Daniel's, once his favourite drink, and the other a hyperactive bichon frise called Sprite, after his favourite mixer. There seems to be a housekeeper, but lunch is to be ham rolls from the local bakery and lukewarm coffee. Barrymore will take just one bite of his roll. He doesn't eat when he's working, and this is working. But, for now, he seems to be avoiding me. Then, finally, he appears. He's tall - 6ft 3in - slim, casually dressed and smiling. How is he?'I'm well at the moment, slowly getting back to a bit of sanity. Twenty-one months off the booze.'
The voice is startling - low, thick-lipped and slurry - and his eyes are hooded. He sounds as if he's on tranquillisers, but he says he's taking nothing. The next time we meet he speaks much more clearly. The slurry voice seems to be either shyness - he is, amazingly but quite obviously, shy - or a result of his wariness with the press. He seems to slur when he is on his guard. Anyway, the issue behind our meeting - the circumstances of Lubbock's death and mutilation - is quickly dealt with. The immediate press version was that Lubbock died at a gay orgy, hence the injuries. Barrymore's version is, first, that it was no gay orgy, it wasn't even a party, it was just a gathering at his house of a group of people he'd met that night. There were three girls there and almost all the men were straight. He has no idea how Lubbock came to overdose and drown. He did leave the scene - not out of guilt, but solely because he 'lost it'. And finally, all the evidence indicates that Lubbock's injuries happened after he arrived at the hospital. A submission from Barrymore's lawyers has gone to the police and they are investigating. The fact that they are investigating has been enough to reignite BBC interest in publishing the autobiography. Brown shows me a letter from the BBC suggesting the book might now come out. It is 'delighted to hear' that the police are looking into Michael's statements.
