If we’re going to get into genetics, although I’m a bit of a neo-Lamarckian when it comes to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, I’ve spent most of my life trying to counteract my genes (whether by acquiring as many Jewish friends as possible as soon as we moved to LA, or by voluntarily exiling myself to the colonial motherland as an adult). You know that feeling you get as a kid at Christmas when you see your relatives sitting around and think, ‘I’ve got to get out of here . . . ’ Surely it can’t just have been me who felt that way? It wasn’t that I’d had a bad time in the bosom of my family, or that they were genetically unsound, I just wanted to see a bit more of the world.
My grandfather on my dad’s side was an early stepping-stone into a different kind of landscape. He was a Baptist preacher (albeit one who qualified via mail order rather than theological college), a big, charming guy who lived in the South, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We’d driven down there from Minnesota a couple of times and my memories of those early trips are a splashy blur of swinging out and jumping into creeks on big tyres on ropes. All that shit was great, except that when you rolled around in the tall grass you’d get covered in ticks and chiggers – a.k.a. nasty little biting fuckers that burrowed under your skin, and when you tried to pull them off their heads broke off inside you, causing days of painful itching.
Another thing that stuck in my mind about the South in the forties and fifties was how civilised it seemed. Everybody was always so polite – black and white, everyone would say ‘Good morning’ on the street – you couldn’t have asked for nicer people. Of course, I’d realise later on that all this politeness was conditional on everyone staying in their place. (Although many years later I did meet a black woman who shared my surname in the foyer of a London film company, so the Gilliams must have done the odd bit of mixing and matching on the quiet.)
The first time I went out to Hot Springs on my own, in the summer of 1955, I experienced a foretaste of later dissenting tendencies, but in this case the seeds of disenchantment were planted – as so often – in the fertile mulch of self-interest.
The same July weekend that I was first trusted to embark on the long train journey East from LA all by myself also turned out to be a historic occasion on a larger scale – the grand opening of the original Disneyland, an hour down the road from Panorama City, in Anaheim, California.
I was tremendously disappointed to be away from LA for what, by my reckoning – then as now – was one of the major cultural events of the twentieth century. Missing out on what turned out to be a famously disastrous opening ceremony (notwithstanding the reassuring presence of Ronald Reagan – a man from whom both California and the world in general would later hear more than they might’ve expected – as one of the three TV anchors) was about the closest I ever came to real childhood trauma. That’s what kills me; I’ve always wanted the scars, but I just don’t have them. In fact, that’s probably why I had to go into film-making – to acquire the deep emotional and spiritual wounds which my shockingly happy childhood had so callously denied me.
Once back from Arkansas, I wasted no time in making good my Disneyland deficit, returning to Walt’s magical kingdom many times in the years that followed. The thing that made Disneyland a genuinely enchanting place for me was the quality of the craftsmanship. Previously, theme parks had always been pretty tacky, gimcracked places, but so much love and care went into making Disney’s dream a reality – there were no shortcuts.
Everything you could ever think of, he put in there . . . it wasn’t just about seeing the favourite cartoons of your childhood in 3-D. Disneyland was also where I first learned about architecture – the way the windows would be scaled on Georgian buildings to give them a greater sense of height – and Sleeping Beauty’s castle became the template for all my ideas about Europe. OK, it was a fantasy land, and some might say I’ve been living there ever since, but at least now I know where the dirt is hidden.
It wasn’t all about Yurp (as Europe was pronounced in America). On the African ride, you’d get on the boat from The African Queen, and the animals would poke their heads up from the water or suddenly appear roaring from behind a tree – it was everything you could want from travel, but without the bugs. Then there was the World of Tomorrow, featuring the Monsanto House of the Future (which didn’t seem as sinister an idea then as a genetically modified future does now). You could drive little cars in the miniature Autopia, even though you weren’t yet old enough to have a driving licence. And Main Street was like a dream version of America: idyllic and historical at the same time.
My imagination was always stimulated by enclosed worlds with their own distinct hierarchies and sets of rules – whether that be the virtual reality of Disney’s Tomorrowland, or the medieval castles or Roman courts of the ‘sword and sandal’ movie epics, which I loved just as much. Such well-defined social structures give you something to react against and take the piss out of, and I’ve always – and I still do this – tended to simplify the world into a series of nice, clear-cut oppositions, which I can mess around at the edges of. It’s when things become more abstract and unclear that I start to struggle.
There are few more exotic and compelling examples of a self-contained community than the travelling show, and some of my most vivid childhood memories were supplied by the annual visits of the Clyde Beatty circus, which used to set up in the car park in Panorama City and put the word out for local kids to come and help raise the tents. They’d give you a bit of money in return for the work you did, but I found the carnival atmosphere so intoxicating that I’d probably have done it for nothing. They always needed extra pairs of hands and one year, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I ended up helping out in the freak-show tent. The experience of seeing all the exotic circus acts sitting around playing cards – just like everyday people, except they were pin-heads or dwarves – has stayed with me to this day. It wasn’t just the revelation that these extraordinary people would behave in such a normal way that fascinated me – in retrospect, that should have been obvious – it was the moment when the show would begin, the barkers would introduce them, ‘All the way from darkest Africa . . . ’, and they’d have to instantly make that transition to being ‘the leopard man’ or ‘the alligator boy’.
I must have been about fourteen when I helped raise clyde Beatty’s freak-show tent. It was not to be the only circus in my life.
The idea of someone subsuming themselves completely within another identity has always intrigued me, I suppose because that’s something I’ve never felt quite able to do myself. As far as my first forays into public performance as a junior magician were concerned, I was so bad that I’d generally find myself fucking up the tricks themselves and then having to do something ridiculous to get myself out of the resulting mess. It seemed much easier to just act the goat as a way of keeping people at a certain distance – for a while I earned myself the nickname of ‘clown’ from other kids of my age for my willingness to make a fool of myself in order to distract audiences from my technical shortcomings.
I was always very gregarious and loved making people laugh, but I think ultimately the reason I was never going to become a performer first and foremost – and certainly not an actor – was that at heart I don’t have the neediness or incompleteness that will ultimately drive you in that direction. I like showing off, and I don’t mind making a fool of myself or playing the grotesque, but I’ve never been comfortable exposing whatever subtler sensitivities and emotions I may or may not have buried deep-down inside. That’s the well a good actor is willing to dip into and reveal to the world. I prefer to hide behind a mask or a cartoon.
The most important single cultural influence on my teenage years was Mad comics. They had a very distinct brand of humour, which kids of my generation had in common (and subsequent ones too, as the magazine went from strength to strength – commercially, if not artistically – in the years after its co-founder and my comic book superhero Harvey Kurtzman moved on in 1956), in much the same
way that Monty Python or South Park would end up uniting people in later years.
Still a little way to go here in terms of background detail, although the trash-can is a start. But I make no apology for the civic-minded understone – people dropping litter have always made me angry.
BABE PRESLEY – that’s old Elvis, in an early drawing from my high school magazine. You can see how much care I’ve taken over the signature. You get the signature right and everything else follows – that’s how it worked for Picasso, too. I’ve been lucky to be exactly the right age at the right time at several different points in my life, and 1956 was definitely a good year to be sixteen (just as ten years later, being a bit older than most of the first generation of hippies probably helped stop me getting as badly fucked up as some of my friends did). I remember sitting in a parked car outside my high school when ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came on the radio and thinking ‘Shit! I’ve never heard anything like that before.’ But there was no danger of me trying to follow in Elvis’ blue suede footsteps. I played the French horn in the school band and openings were few and far between for people lumbering around wrapped in one of those at Sun Records. I didn’t care, though. I loved the way the sound of that instrument came from another space, and I was good at dancing, so the benefits of the rock ’n’ roll era were not completely denied to me in an out-of-school context.
Looking back, there were some similarities with Python, in that Mad could be very intelligent and unbelievably silly at the same time, and this was obviously a mixture I liked. Its highest purpose was to entertain, but if you could have fun while saying something important at the same time, then so much the better.
The first lesson I learned from Mad comics was that one of the most effective ways of making a comedic point is to take a well-known character with certain widely accepted attributes, and then turn them on their head or use them in illicit ways. Whether that meant subverting a pre-existing comic strip or TV show or – because Mad mainstay Harvey Kurtzman loved movies so much – using familiar faces or storylines from the cinema as grist to the mill of political satire (Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny was a < particular favourite), I found the audacity of it breathtaking and hilarious.
The other key thing about Mad comics, apart from the boldness of its parodies and appropriations, was that it was beautifully drawn. The penman ship of Jack Davis was so amazing that I just had to try to copy it – that was how I schooled myself as a draftsman, not with Rembrandt but with Jack Davis: looking at the effects he’d achieved and trying to work out how he’d done it by having a go myself. All the main Mad artists brought something different to the table – Willy Elder was the gag-master. Harvey would write a basic storyline and then Willy would add all these little accretions of humorous detail (which he called ‘chicken fat’), so you could go back to his work time and time again and keep finding new things in it. Years later, Elder’s drawings would end up being maybe the biggest single influence on how I’d make movies – inspiring me to try to fill up each shot with so much detail that it would repay second, third and even fourth viewings.
Harvey Kurtzman’s magazines were, in a sense, movies without movement. I learned from Mad and Help! how to do zooms, tracking shots, close-ups – all the grammar of film.
Last but not least among the building blocks of Mad comics’ irresistible allure was the unabashed sensuality of Wally Wood’s female characters, which were so unbearably sexy that they almost felt like pornography. As a precautionary acknowledgement of the vague sense of impropriety associated with the publication, I used to hide my Mad comics in the garage. On one unfortunate occasion they were discovered, and I got a whipping with a belt for my pleasures, but if that was meant to be aversion therapy, it didn’t work, probably because the leathery strictures were applied by my dad, who didn’t think it was entirely justified and was just doing my mother’s dirty work for her.
It wasn’t that I didn’t take anything seriously when I was growing up. On the contrary, I was so intensely engaged with all the things that did interest me that it sometimes made me oblivious to salient facts about my broader situation. In some ways, this inner directedness was a good thing – it meant other kids found me quite easy to be around, because I had no issues, and basically inhabited my own private world, which at least made sense to me. But it could also lead to unwelcome surprises, when my naive vision of the world came into conflict with reality.
For many people, such a conflict might have manifested itself in the form of unexpected public humiliation at the hands of malevolently inclined schoolmates. For me, it was more likely to involve having the mantle of unsought social responsibility thrust upon me. At the tender age of fourteen, just a couple of years after my arrival at Chase Street Elementary School in Panorama City, I found myself giving the school’s graduation address on the subject of ‘Mexico’, a topic about which I knew extraordinarily little. Later on at Birmingham High School – which was one of the largest in LA, with more than 2,000 students in an old army hospital that had been converted into classrooms after the war – one of the most painfully embarrassing moments in my educational career would see me elected king of the senior prom, in preference to my infinitely better-qualified best friend Steve Gellar, who just happened to be Jewish.
Before we can dip a nervous toe into that particular WASP-plagued swimming pool, the particular chronology of my personal odyssey from teenage paragon of civic virtue to subversive cartoonist-in-waiting requires a digression into scouting. Being a boy scout was great fun because it took me out into nature, and you had to work as a group and learn new skills – two activities I still enjoy to this day. The Morse code I don’t use so much, but I can still do knot tying, and if I was trapped in a well with a broken arm, I could probably tie a bowline around myself with just the other arm to pull myself out, which is a reassuring ability to have.
Scout meetings were once a week, but every now and then they’d take us on these amazing camping trips up in the mountains. That’s what’s wonderful about LA – how close the San Bernardino mountains are. We’d go up there for the weekend and sit around the campfire at night, where tales would be told – all these things which are so primal, and which I’ve never quite grown out of. (Luckily I went into showbiz, so I’ve never had to.)
Even at one with nature in the wilds as we were, Hollywood’s magic Kingdom still cast a long shadow.
Among the stars who came out to dazzle us in the light-pollution-free skies of Irvine Ranch were several – Danny Kaye and Debbie Reynolds among them – who I’d later get to know via friendships with their diversely talented offspring. If you’d broken this big news to the thirteen-year-old me, I would’ve found it immensely unlikely.
The most spectacular of these outward-bound excursions was the 1953 National Scouts Jamboree at Irvine Ranch in southern California. It’s probably all identical tract homes now, but then it was a huge temporary hormonal metropolis of 45,000 teenage boys in shorts.
We stayed there for a whole week – it was our Kumbh Mela – and hopefully these extracts from the beautifully designed official souvenir brochure (design standards were stratospheric in 1950s America, as the pristine layouts of my high school yearbooks will also attest) give you some sense of the mood of this infectiously purposeful corralling of youthful vitality.
As if to suggest that there might be some truth in the old adage that ‘politics is show-business for ugly people’, another distingiushed visitor – vice president Richard Nixon – also dropped by to briefly rejoin his old troop. ‘The Veep squatted on his haunches [it says here] and whipped up one of the 44,000 best patrol pancake breakfasts eaten on the Irvine Ranch that morning.’ Pity the 1,000 scouts who didn’t get breakfasts. Just the previous year he had failed in his attempt to become governor of our fair state – famously telling reporters, ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more’ – but he could still make a mean pancake: truly, there was no stopping that man. Richard Nixon was certainly an i
nteresting character – you couldn’t take that away from him. Years later I sat near him on a plane and noticed for the first time how huge his head was. I was in the row right behind him at first, but then his security guys pushed me back – I think they needed more room for his head.
Marching, carrying flags, these are the kinds of things we did in the fifties. The Cold War was very much in everyone’s minds, from the ‘duck and cover’ exercises we had to do at school to ensure that we would be properly prepared for a possible Soviet nuclear attack, to the hysterical witch hunt of the McCarthy hearings. That’s why we were healthy, we were strong and we were good – we weren’t quite America’s Hitler Youth, but there was definitely a militaristic undertow. Our scout troop was a little army in miniature, and if cold-war push ever came to shove, the communists didn’t have a chance: tomorrow belonged to us.
Or so I thought, until the time came for me to make the inevitable transition from Life to Eagle Scout, the scouting equivalent of a scientologist going ‘clear’. While not necessarily the highest achiever in our troop, I was certainly one of the top two or three, having been awarded approximately fifty-three merit badges in useful disciplines such as cooking, carpentry, safety, firemanship, fishing and animal industry. (What exactly is ‘animal industry’? I guess it’s battery chickens – how to raise poultry in the smallest space imaginable.) And yet for some reason our scout leader wouldn’t accept that I’d earned all my badges in the proper way.
Gilliamesque Page 3
