by David Morgan
And then of course when I pulled out of the group and started writing with Connie, I was not only wanting to write with Connie but around about that time the last thing I wanted to do was go and write with a full-blown alcoholic. And I think he had all sorts of difficult feelings, whereas I was just glad to be out of there. I wanted to be with someone who would be on time and know what was going on. Now, after he cleaned his act up, it was good fun working with him again. But what happened was that we went from seeing a great deal of each other in 1972, ’73, until I then started writing with Connie, so I wasn’t seeing Graham during the day and I wasn’t performing with him.
GILLIAM: There was a strange kind of self-destructiveness going on with Graham. In New York he used to come back, he was constantly getting hit by people, there was some transvestite who’d attacked him once—he came back all bloody.
In the end I used to get really pissed off at Graham, because it was becoming like Dorian Gray, and there was a portrait somewhere, but the portrait was a living person. John Tomiczek was his ward, this was a guy that turned up one day in the studio. John was like something out of Death in Venice, this totally androgynous creature, beautiful creature. It was hard to know whether John was a boy or a girl, he was just beautiful. And then it turned out later Graham had adopted him as his ward. I had no idea what if anything was going on between them, but he became his ward, because he’d come from this poor Liverpool family, lots of kids, and Graham took him on.
And as the years go by, Graham’s drinking never affected him—he’d look the same—but John Tomiczek was putting on weight and bloating, and getting uglier. Graham was giving this kid everything, but he was somehow the living portrait of Graham Chapman. It got so bad there was a party at his place one night, we were all there, and somebody had been there [who] wasn’t invited and Graham threw him out. Fifteen minutes later there was a knock at the door, and John went to the door and they were there and they slashed his face open with a razor. So not only was he bloated but now he was scarred. And this went on, and I was beginning to hate Graham: “What do you think you’re doing to this kid?” And Graham just sucked on his pipe, like there was no connection between his lifestyle and what was happening with John.
And in the end John died of a heart attack not long after Graham died, this kid. It was the most bizarre thing watching this happen. And Graham just floated through life sucking his pipe, it was a weird kind of total obliviousness to any responsibility. That was a time I began to get really worried, because it was one thing when Graham was really outrageous and funny, and then it sort of moved into something else and started first affecting him and then those around him, in a way that was affecting them worse than it was affecting him. He sort of passed this thing through himself and on to somebody else. It became really weird. I went through a long period when I was really angry with Graham, I thought, “This is wrong, this is immoral,” and he felt one could be free in any way.
It’s like—well, that’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: the bad side goes so far and then it comes out; you can’t keep doing that, there’s a limit to where you go.
DAVID SHERLOCK: It seems to me such a strange thing that Graham in life was not afraid of the physical act of death. He’d seen it, he dealt with it, he actually nursed very well a wonderful young cartoonist who was on The Frost Show who died of leukemia in St. Bart’s Hospital. Incidentally, Graham didn’t quite finish his [medical] training, because in this country you had to do two years’ internship and he never did that. He just couldn’t be bothered, obviously, when he’d already started a career. I wouldn’t say he practiced, but he occasionally would write prescriptions for people—he was very careful about for whom and what, and would often turn down requests.
Graham had fooled us in the last three weeks that he was going to survive; in fact, he even showed us an X-ray taken of his chest to show that there [was] no cancer left. I actually think they gave him any old X-ray; it’s a known technique, particularly in the last weeks or so with someone who is obsessed with getting home, wants to be at home, cannot stand being in the hospital—he was a terrible patient, most doctors are! They knew they were sending him home to die, and probably he did because he kept up the illusion that he was getting better.
It was perfectly obvious; he had a relapse which was extremely traumatic, and from then on the next forty-eight hours were just whirlwind sensations, vague memories for me. It’s like a nightmare, of course, because the very thing that we’d worked all year to try and prevent was happening and there was nothing I could do.
CLEESE: We had a dinner together about eighteen months before he died, and he was on about free radicals, and I was amazed at just how careful and disciplined he was about his eating, as though he was going to live forever. And then when we turned up at some meeting a year later, I hadn’t seen him for a bit, he walked in and I suddenly heard this high-pitched voice. I thought he was clowning around, and I turned and was actually shocked; he looked terrible, some sort of red marking on his skin where he’d had some kind of radiation, and he was talking in a high voice. From that point on I saw quite a lot of him, and I was there when he died.
What was your most surprising reaction to the loss when Graham died?
CLEESE: First of all, an enormous sense of sadness, and then the surprising bit (which kicked in after three or four days) was a sense of relief. Graham had an almost infinite capacity for fantasy. I discovered he really had a genuine problem about distinguishing reality from his own fantasy. And I was always worried (because he was chronically short of money) that he would one day go and sell his story or memoirs to one of the British Sunday tabloids. And I thought if he was out of sorts with the group at the time, there was always a danger—because he was very emotional—that a whole lot of his fantasy life would get put down on paper. You would then spend the rest of your life saying, “No, it wasn’t like that.” I remember thinking, “Well, at least that’s not going to happen.” Although he did in fact sell some sort of life story to the Sun not so long before he died and it was fine, I had that fear.
He did come out with A Liar’s Autobiography.
CLEESE: Which was my idea, oddly enough. I was going to do a thing about winning the Cup Final, playing inside right with Stanley Matthews, and being on Everest with Hillary—a nice idea, and he kind of took it off me, which I was perfectly fine with. But once when I was really wanting to leave the group, he gave an interview to one of the tabloids in which he told a story that was so fantastic, something about the fact that I’d hidden his pipe and he chased me across the studio floor and rugby-tackled me and sat on my head! And it appeared, and I read it and thought, “He’s crazy!” He had no capacity a lot of the time of really knowing what had happened and what hadn’t.
So there was a sense of relief, but also a great sense of loss, and I realized that the loss was not so much a loss in the present. In the previous years I hadn’t seen him for ages so he wasn’t a part of my life, so my sadness was thinking back to a time and thinking how positive and good most of it had been. It was positive and good from 1962 through Python, but when he became a drunk it was unpleasant.
DOUGLAS ADAMS: The last time I spoke to him would have been just a few days before he died. I hadn’t spoken to him that regularly for quite a while, and I often wondered exactly what he knew at that point. He’d been discharged; effectively the doctors knew he wasn’t going to make it, but there was no point in keeping him in hospital anymore. He must have known. But what Graham said absolutely to everybody, with complete conviction, was that he was now in remission and it was all going to be fine. And so when I talked to him he was very, very chatty and full of all the things he could now do: this project and that project and how great it was going to be, and all this kind of stuff. Four or five days later he was dead.
He must have known. I don’t know whether he was just being very brave for everybody else or deluded.
Would that have been like him, to pretend for the sake of o
thers?
ADAMS: But also self-delusion would have been like him. My guess is that there isn’t actually one answer. I think probably intellectually he must have known, but probably the reality/distortion field we all maintain would have told him that of course he can beat this, just as his personal reality/distortion field would have told him all sorts of completely implausible things in the past.
It’s funny, there was such an extraordinary warmth. I’m sort of sitting here, visualizing him puttering out of the room, just sort of purring with laughter.
SHERLOCK: The Pythons were wonderful to me after Gray died, particularly for the memorial in London. The funeral was in a very small crematorium in Kent, it only held eighty people, and although the Pythons wanted to come, his own family I think were too distressed. And as it was, it was far too public, because the world’s press turned up (whether we liked it or not), and we were just not in any state to do that.
In fact, as we approached the crematorium there was this battery of cameras. I actually said to his nephews and nieces, who were in the same car with me, “One thing you do not do is look right or left—you look straight ahead, or you keep your head down.” Because I had just seen Diana Dors’ funeral, where people were running over gravestones to talk, because they were in an emotional state; they couldn’t know until they saw themselves on camera how it looked like they were eagerly running to talk to the cameramen about how much they loved Diana. I don’t think that’s the case at all, but that’s how they looked, and I was not going to have that situation at Graham’s funeral.
ADAMS: John Cleese said a number of things at Graham’s memorial. He said he wanted to be the first person to say “fuck” at a memorial service! But he also said, “Graham was above all honest. He was frighteningly honest with himself and he was appallingly honest with other people. And he would hate it if I were [to] stand up at his memorial service and say anything less than the honest truth, which was that he was a freeloading bastard!” That caused a bit of a moment!
But you see the whole of that was true. I could see why John particularly and the rest of the Pythons would get pretty exasperated when in fact they felt he was maybe not pulling his weight and being drunk and troublesome. But nevertheless that kind of brutal honesty that he brought (even if it was a drunk’s honesty, which is often completely self-deluded) was a very, very powerful force at work. It wouldn’t be Python without any one of them, but one could see very strongly it wouldn’t be Python without Graham.
SHERLOCK: I’ve had some of the most gracious letters from fans; the outpouring of emotion when he died was extraordinary. His brother and sister-in-law were in Canada when he died, and the university they were visiting was having a Graham celebration and dedicated a whole evening of student comedy to Graham and in particular one sketch where a group of students was singing “Autumn Leaves,” and as it happened thousands of leaves showered down until they were almost covered and they still kept on singing, and someone came with one of those leaf blowers that blew them away. His brother and sister-in-law were absolutely amazed that they should be so far from home and yet it was happening even there. And nobody knew they were there; it wasn’t done for them, it was done for the students themselves, because they wanted to do something to at least mark his passing.
THE “IF YOU COULD SAVE ONLY ONE THING YOU’VE PRODUCED” CHAPTER
An unfair question, but one which shall be asked anyway: A fire is raging in a warehouse which contains everything you have ever done. If you could run into the inferno and rescue but one item that would be preserved for future generations, what would it be?
IDLE: My penis.
GILLIAM: I can’t bring my three children out, that doesn’t count? I produced those!
Don’t worry, the kids are safe.
GILLIAM: I don’t know if I agree with it, but I suppose I’d probably have to hold Brazil to be the one. I mean, it’s still the one that’s probably the truest, completest, most “me” of anything. The most cathartic it was at the time I did it, and the most about things that were really driving me mad. [But] the odd thing is, I’m not that person anymore, so it’s actually saving somebody (or a representation of that person) who doesn’t exist anymore. When I watch it I’m kind of astonished by it, that I made it; all I know is that I didn’t; a guy named Terry Gilliam who looks a lot like me did it years ago, but it was another guy. Maybe that’s the guy I’d like to save, the guy that made that.
Then I look at Fisher King, and I say, “I like that, that’s the sweetest one. Maybe I ought to keep the sweetest one.” Then Time Bandits is—I don’t know, I’d probably be so busy trying to make up my mind they’d all burn—then I’d probably go down with them!
PALIN: In the category of Python material I would say in Life of Brian, the scene with the Centurion sending people off to be crucified (“Crucifixion? Good, out of the door, line on the left, one cross each. Next?”). I just love that character, because there’s all these people surrounding this centurion, Nisus Wettus, who’s trying to do his best, decent chap, out of a good school, been posted to Judea, surrounded by these complete lunatics.
And the other would be from “Roger of the Raj” (an episode of Ripping Yams): Lord Bartlesham, this terribly decent chap stuck in this little terrible reactionary world, and his wife. They’re just fun, the two of them together:
LORD BARTLESHAM:
Just suppose for a minute that when Wallenstein reached the gates of Magdeburg in 1631, instead of razing the city to the ground and putting its inhabitants to the sword, he’d said, What a lovely place! How lucky you are to live here. I live in Sweden, you must come and see me some time. Just think what a difference it would have made. He’d have gone down in history as a nice chap, instead of the Butcher of Magdeburg.
LADY BARTLESHAM:
Eat up dear, and stop talking piffle.
I’m a great fan of the “Fish Slapping Dance”; if all the work I’d ever done was going to be destroyed, I could save one minute of it, I’d rather save the “Fish Slapping Dance.” These sketches you can debate one against the other; the “Fish Slapping Dance,” there’s something so elementally silly about it, it works so satisfactorily, that I would put that on the list.
JONES: Maybe my children’s books, Fairy Tales and Fantastic Stories.
CLEESE: You’re assuming my cats are safely out? My Modigliani and my cats?
Only your work is at risk.
CLEESE: Oh, I’d let it all bum! I actually don’t feel any of it’s very important. I mean, I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t have, not one. I think Life of Brian is the best of the Python movies, and there’s two or three Fawlty Towers I’m very very fond of: the rat and the psychiatrist and the dead body. But I have to say none of them matter to me very much, do you know what I mean?
I’m not someone who looks back; that’s my temperament. Somebody once said you only really start to age when you look back; well, that’s not the reason that I don’t look back. I don’t look back because I’m the sort of person who doesn’t look back, I’ve not much interest in it at all. There will come a time when I do look back, and then I think I’ll get quite a lot of pleasure out of plying through old Fawlty Towers, looking through scrapbooks, but right at the moment I’m much more interested in the next lot of things I have to do. And that isn’t a choice, that’s not an attitude; that comes from the sort of person you are. I have no control over it.
21ST-CENTURY PYTHON
Reunited at Aspen, 1998.
Thank God for That. For One Ghastly Moment I Thought I Was…Too Late
On March 7, 1998, HBO brought together the Pythons for an informal stage appearance during the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, taping the proceedings for broadcast. Apart from being the first public appearance of all five surviving Pythons in many years, the occasion became noteworthy for the almost sacrilegious handling of the supposed “ashes” of Graham Chapman, which were brought on stage in his stead and which ended up being vacu
umed by a Dustbuster.
Gilliam kicking over the “ashes” of Chapman at the Aspen reunion.
The Aspen appearance merely fueled speculation and rumors that—in anticipation of Python’s thirtieth anniversary in 1999—the group would reunite for a stage show, a tour, or even another movie.
CLEESE: What was really nice about Aspen and also the subsequent dinner that four of us had in London was just to see how well we all got on. As the main cause of dispute in the group (which was the material) has faded into the background, it enables us all to get on in the way that we basically always did get on—a personal level. The relationships have always been quite good; it’s been the work that’s thrown up the cause of the disagreements. And we got on well, and that’s why we thought it would be fun to do something [for the thirtieth anniversary].
But then the very next day Terry Gilliam said to Michael Palin and Terry Jones that he didn’t really want to do it, which is not what he said in the room. And then some weeks, months later, Michael decided he didn’t really want to do six or eight weeks, he really only wanted to do two. So trying to get everybody’s needs together has proved very difficult.
You see, the show itself will be quite costly, so if we do two weeks, say in Las Vegas, all that ticket money may go just to pay for the production, so that the only money that comes to us would effectively be from the television sales, and by the time that’s been split several ways—and there’s been several weeks writing it, two weeks rehearsal, two weeks performing—it’s not a particularly exciting offer compared to what we get for movies. But we may decide to do it anyway just out of affection for Python, and because it marks the thirtieth anniversary quite well.
