Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  All Fools’ Day. Begins badly. Mercifully brief, but poor reviews of Jabberwocky in The Times and the Telegraph and the Mirror, which calls it tedious. Doldrums for a while.

  At two drive over to Notting Hill Gate to J Cleese’s rather sweet little cottage at the back of the Notting Hill Gaumont.

  Much appreciation of a very good Guardian April Fool – a seven-page report on a totally fictitious island in the Indian Ocean called San Seriffe. Very well done – complete with photos and adverts and always just on the right side of probability. Eric suggests we send them one of our golden feet (originally made as a present for our US lawyer, Bob Osterberg). Anne is contacted and we send the foot to The Guardian ‘for services to San Seriffe’ on paper headed ‘Python Productions Ltd, Evado Tax House, San Seriffe’.

  (It’s not the first time this week that Python has been moved to feats of appreciation by the newspapers. A Guardian report on Monday that Gay News are short of £12,000 funds to help them fight the blasphemous libel case brought against them by M Whitehouse for publishing a poem which suggested that Christ received some sexual favours while on the cross, moved us to send £500 as a Python contribution to the mag.)

  Sunday, April 3rd

  For about the fourth day running I have to buy every morning newspaper as Jabberwocky breaks over London. After Friday’s setbacks, I’m prepared for everything or anything.

  Relief comes in grand style. Alan Brien leads his Sunday Times ‘Cinema’ column with a long, funny, appreciative review, and we get the photo too. Marvellous – the best review so far. We also get the photo in The Observer, which turns in a long Time Ont-ish review, quoting many of the funnier ideas of the film, calling me well-cast, but wasted, and lauding Max Wall, but ending by calling the film ‘forgettable’, which seems an odd adjective to use at the end of a long and detailed review. But the Sunday Telegraph is unequivocally favourable, as are the Sunday Express and the News of the World (‘loveable lunacy’!). So I settle down to my croissants reassured and revived.

  Monday, April 4th

  Spend the morning mugging up on latest financial reports, etc, etc, in preparation for a board meeting. Drove out to Shepperton – approved of the big new sign outside. Air of great activity about the place. Passed Brando’s caravan and drove on round to Graham Ford’s office.

  Cheerful chat about Jabberwocky. Both Graham and his wife/secretary very enthusiastic but, as no-one had turned up after 20 minutes, I ventured to ask how things were with Superman. Then Ford quite casually dropped his bombshell. Superman is leaving Shepperton in a couple of months to complete at Pinewood. Ford blathers chirpily about some financial deal which Superman’s producers must have made with Pinewood and quite steadfastly refuses to get angry, anxious or even excited about the whole matter.

  With this shadow hanging over us, we walk over to the restaurant. At a table are Richard Donner, tall, bespectacled, with a greying mop-head of hair and an intelligent face – director of Superman (and The Omen), Ilya and Alex Salkind, the producers. At another table is a quiet, regular-faced young man with a college boy look and a battered old sweater with a huge hole in it. This is Superman (Christopher Reeve). A man keeps looking over towards us rather nervously – as well he might. He’s the English producer, who got the production into Shepperton.

  Clive H and Chas Gregson arrive, with them is Clancy Sigal, an American writer now working in England, who’s come to do an article on Shepperton and Superman. Oh the ironies of the day!

  Clive has been to see the Salkinds, and his account of the meeting tends to Ford’s theory that the Salkinds have done some deal with Pinewood (which is empty, and yet fully union staffed). Superman has moved studios already – from Cinecitta, Bray and now Shepperton – it is running behind schedule and Pinewood is owned by Rank, who also own one of the two main distribution networks in the UK.

  Salkind says Shepperton has no major shortcomings itself. The inefficiencies here, he said to Clive, were like a splinter in the toe – a source of irritation, not enough to stop you walking. He (Salkind) doesn’t seem angry at Shepperton, or want to make any big publicity point about moving. Clive reckons £190,000 is owed to us by Superman. Brando and Hackman have to be filmed here, because of their limited availability, so we appear at the moment to be in quite a strong position.

  Wednesday, April 6th

  Five past twelve – settling in bed with Siegfried Sassoon and the Somme Offensive, when the phone rings. It’s John Goldstone. Rugoff wants to open Jabberwocky at Cinema One in New York on Friday, April 15th – a week earlier than he had planned. I tell him that I can’t really go until Wednesday of next week – Easter, with trips to Abbotsley and Southwold, being almost upon us, and a day looking at locations on Salisbury Plain planned for next Tuesday. John will transmit this news to Rugoff.

  Back to the Somme.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  Wig fitting with Jean Speak at ten. Then along to Jim F’s office. The buyer, John Stevens, is there, with a catalogue of cars for the ‘Olthwaite’ episode. We have blithely written in police cars for a chase (dated 1934), but find that they didn’t have police cars until 1938. This does seem to have given robbers an unfair advantage, but Jim says robbers couldn’t afford cars either.

  Drive down to Salisbury Plain to look at the locations they’ve chosen for ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’.

  Spend an afternoon in huts, built during the First War, which are still used during training exercises. They are Spartan and the attempts to brighten them up are very tacky, and only emphasise the gloomy temporariness of the camps themselves, which cling unconvincingly to the Plain in the teeth of vicious winds. It’s so remote and exposed up there that one could almost be in Labrador rather than one and a half hour’s drive from London.

  Drive back along the M4, arriving at the Centre about 7.30. Taxi home, where I arrive, feeling well and truly flattened, to a volley of phone calls and phone messages which have accumulated over the weekend and in anticipation of my departure for New York tomorrow.

  A little clump of unkind press cuttings about Jabberwocky don’t raise my spirits. John Goldstone sounds cheerful over the phone. After a poor weekend, Jabberwocky attendances are up again, and it’s doing remarkable business in Bromley!

  Wednesday, April 13th, New York

  The New York Times has a total Python-style ad. ‘Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam will be giving away 1,000 potatoes at Cinema One on Friday.’ The motif for the ad is a cowering Dennis figure with a sword and Don is using, to my distress, slogans such as ‘Makes King Kong Look Like an Ape’, which came up at the Connaught meeting in February and was, I had hoped, firmly rejected.

  Terry G has a bagful of books of illustrations by Doré and others, and he is going to redesign the poster yet again.

  Biggest problem of the day is the rating. After viewing the film the authorities have given it an R (Restricted) rating – which means anyone under 18 has to be accompanied. Python was PG – a wider certificate and the one we really want. They say that we can have a PG if we trim the shots of the steaming three-quarters-eaten bodies of the two Terrys and cut the shot of Dennis being peed on as he wakes up.

  Terry refuses to make the cuts.

  Friday, April 15th, New York

  The afternoon audiences have been depressing, but the 700-seat cinema builds up to over half full for the evening shows.

  At ten o’clock the next morning’s papers arrive. Don and his producers pounce eagerly on the New York Times, searching for the word of Vincent Canby. Exactly the same feeling as on the Grail opening in this same cinema two years ago.

  Except that the review is better. It’s longer than the Grail, it’s headlined ‘Jabberwocky: Monster With Heart’, it’s the top film previewed, and there’s a photo too. The review is a joy, better than anything so far in the UK or US. Vincent clearly loves Jabberwocky and went to some lengths to say so. Not a harsh word or a qualification – 24-carat gold praise.

  Don and the executives
of Cinema-5 (who suddenly materialise from the foyer) are overjoyed and read and re-read the paper like men who’ve just won the Pools. So it is a good picture after all, they seem to be saying.

  Saturday, April 16th, New York

  To breakfast with Terry. Bought New York Post, which slams the film most violently. ‘Jabberwocky: Read Meaningless’ is the headline – and the reviewer hates the film as violently as Canby likes it. His only non-violent comment is that I was ‘amusing but misused’, the rest is hatred.

  Terry G, I’m glad to say, laughs, and indeed the intensity of the man’s dislike would make grand reading next to Canby’s panegyric. If they’re both talking about the same film, it would make me curious to see it!

  Back to my room for an interview with college kids from Princeton for a syndicated radio programme called Focus on Youth. A grim, two-hour ordeal by pretension.

  After a quick shopping spree in FAO Schwarz (a magic set for Willy, a bowling game for Tom and a wooden scooter and painted bricks for Rachel), and a hasty snack at the Plaza, we are just in time for the end of the first Saturday performance at the cinema.

  Not a bad crowd, but they certainly don’t fill the place. A one-legged man approached me as I was about to cross Fifth Avenue. ‘Hi Mike,’ he shouts, ‘How’s this for a silly walk!’

  Sunday, April 17th

  Arrive at Heathrow at a quarter to eleven at night.

  Make for the taxis and home at last. No taxis – just another long queue. Resign myself to a late arrival home and decide to take the airport bus. But this only goes to Victoria, and can’t leave until it’s absolutely full. We are forced to wait for nearly half an hour.

  The bus rattles down to Victoria. It’s all rather embarrassing and disheartening to realise that for most of the passengers (American tourists) this is their first impression of England. Even more disheartening is to be dumped at the Victoria terminal, which has no facilities and, today, no taxis.

  Wander up Buckingham Palace Road with the handle of my FAO Schwarz bag now cutting into my fingers. At last find a cab, but he refuses to take me to Hampstead, saying it’s too far away.

  Almost going spare, I suddenly glimpse an N90 bus with the magic words ‘Camden Town’ on its destination board, stopped at some traffic lights. I race towards it, and leap on with the same feelings of gratitude and relief that someone lost in the desert would show towards a water hole.

  But the conductor, a crusty, near-retirement veteran, was clearly not going to have weary travellers thankfully boarding his bus at half past midnight.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he demands.

  ‘I’ll go anywhere you’re going,’ I reply, still full of happy relief and not yet aware that the man has no sense of humour. This doesn’t go down at all well.

  ‘You tell me where you’re going and I’ll tell you where I’m going,’ he snaps.

  We settle on Camden Town.

  The bus trundles on through Pimlico. My breath is coming back and I’m beginning to recover from the last two hours, when an unfriendly voice cuts through my grateful reverie.

  ‘You’ll have to move that, you know.’

  It’s the conductor indicating my FAO Schwarz bag, once the pride of Fifth Avenue, now the target for abuse on the N90. ‘Yes, alright … I will move it, but just for a moment let me get my breath back.’

  This perfectly reasonable request makes his face twitch and his eyes dart angrily from side to side, but what finally makes this kind and long-suffering man explode is when I ask him to ‘Cool down’. He moves quickly into a fury, tapping his badge and screaming that this is his bus and no-one is going to ask him to cool down.

  Well, I reckon if it’s this bad at this stage of the journey, by the time we reach Camden Town one of us will have died of a heart attack, so I pick my cases up and get off.

  Once I’m off the bus and waiting for the lights to change, he changes his tune completely. ‘I was only doing it for your own good,’ he cries. And ‘You’ll never get another one, you know.’

  As the N90 finally disappears, leaving me laden down in a dimly lit, anonymous Pimlico Street, at a quarter to one in the morning, shouting ‘Keep Smiling!’ at the top of my voice, I find it rather pleasing to think that 24 hours ago I was the star of a New York film premiere.

  Eventually find a cab who has no moral, ethnic, financial or personal reasons for not taking me to Oak Village, and I finally arrive home at 1.30, it having taken me nearly half the time to get from Heathrow to Oak Village as it took me to get from New York to London.

  Thursday, April 21st

  Wig-fitted by an excited Scotsman at Wig Specialities, who greeted me with a little clap of the hands, ‘I’ve seen your bottom simply everywhere.’ (I suppose Jabberwocky has made modesty in my case rather superfluous.)

  A tall, gangly lady, with attractive bony knees rather like Helen’s, was also being wig-fitted. It turned out she was Fiona Richmond, star of most of Paul Raymond’s sex shows – like Pyjama Tops and Let’s Get Laid. The little Scotsman couldn’t control himself after she’d gone. ‘Well I never,’ he said. ‘Two of the country’s top sex symbols in here together!’

  I’ve taken the rest of today off to escort my Ma to Jabberwocky. She arrives at Liverpool Street on the 11.30.

  To Old Compton Street for tea at Patisserie Valerie, then to the 5.40 showing of Jabberwocky at the Columbia. It’s only about 150 souls full, but the audience does seem to enjoy it and only three people (young, rather attractive girls) walk out. I try to hide myself in my coat, but am spotted by the usherettes, who are frightfully excited, and rush up, saying very nice things about me.

  My mother seemed to enjoy it a lot, and I felt that same feeling of enjoyment which I had when I first saw it put together. There are faults, but at least Terry has made a film which, for most of its length, involves, amuses and entertains an audience – with striking and original images and a brilliantly effective evocation of the crumbling mediaeval world. The modern allusions seem to be the ones which sit most uneasily within it. But I felt again what a good piece of work it is.

  Saturday, April 23rd

  Woken at 7.15 by Tom telling me the phone was ringing. It’s Granny. Father is not expected to live much beyond lunchtime. She is just off to the hospital. I promise to get up there as soon as I can. Feel dreadfully bleary and tired. Tell the children. Willy says, quite seriously, that he hopes Rachel (who’s got a slight cold) won’t be dead by lunchtime too.

  Ring Angela. By a quarter to nine Veryan has brought her round and I have woken up sufficiently to drive us both up to Blythburgh. It’s a sunny day, which helps to keep the gloom from settling too heavily. Angela natters on compulsively about her job – her social welfare work in Croydon sounds far more harrowing than anything we are experiencing today.

  Arrive at Blythburgh Hospital just after eleven. As we walk from the car, neither of us, or certainly I myself, have any real idea of what to expect. I have never been near anyone dying before.

  Daddy is breathing heavily and noisily on his back in bed, eyes almost closed, one half-open, glazed and unseeing. His skin is pale and parchment-like and drawn tight over the bones of his face. Mother sits at the bedside, hardly wracked with grief. Indeed she greets us very matter of factly, as if we’d just arrived at a coffee morning.

  A marvellously sane and intelligent middle-aged lady doctor takes us into her room after examining him and tells us that he has pneumonia on the top of one of his lungs and is not likely to survive. She has brought us in here, she says, because, although he is unconscious to all intents and purposes, one never can be sure about the sense of hearing. This worries me a little, as I had, when I arrived, rather loudly queried whether it was terminal.

  The doctor, grasping my mother’s hand in a firm, comforting, but unsentimental clasp of reassurance, cannot give us any real estimate of how long Dad will live. His unconsciousness means that the heart has the minimum of work to do and he could survive for anything from an hour to two or
three days. She suggests, very tactfully, that there is little to be gained from us all clustering around the body waiting for him to die, so on her advice I take Ma (who has been at his bedside for five hours) back to Reydon, where we do a bit of shopping and have some lunch.

  We return to the hospital just after two. His condition is the same. I wait beside the bed, and after a while find myself becoming quite accustomed to the rattling gurgle of deeply drawn breaths which had so unnerved me when I first saw him.

  As we really don’t know how long he will survive, it’s decided that I shall go back to London and Angela will stay with Mother, at least until Monday. Tomorrow I have to travel to Durham and on Monday morning the first of the last three Ripping Yarns begins filming.

  On the way back I stop at the hospital. Father has been moved up to one end of the ward. He’s breathing as heavily and noisily as before. The nurses still wash him and turn him regularly. He lies in a clean and comfortable bed. In the background the news and the football results. What a ritual Sports Report always used to be on a Saturday. At about 6.25 I leave.

  I’m 33 and he’s 77 when I last see him, an emaciated, gravel-breathed shadow of the father I knew.

  Say goodbye to the nurses, knowing I won’t see them again. One of them says he’d really grown to like my dad, which is nice, because it didn’t happen that way often during his life.

  Into the car and down the A12 to London. Beyond Ipswich, a colossal rainstorm. I must have been passing Colchester when Father died – at 7.25. Mother and Angela were almost at Blythburgh, slowed down by the heavy rain. He was dead by the time they got there.

  Sunday, April 24th, Durham

  Preparations for departure. Packing cases, writing last-minute letters, regretting lack of time and feeling of unpreparedness for the weeks to come.

  Swimming – always good for calming the troubled breast, then a roast beef lunch, and am driven down to catch the three o’clock train at King’s Cross.