Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Warner Brothers – or rather John Calley, one of their top men – are keen and Denis and George are happy to go with Calley although he is not offering them an enormous advance, or indeed any advance at all. But they like him. In passing Denis tells us that in fact there is more of his personal money at stake in this movie than George’s – but then he smiles when we become solicitous and says ‘Well, if it bombs, it’s just a couple of houses.’ I must say he’s the nicest rich man I know.

  We talk about the stage show. Eric is like the Top Scholar of the Year at the Dale Carnegie School of Positive Thinking. A powerhouse of ideas, projects, facts – all very impressive.

  He sees the stage show in LA as a glorious celebration of Python – and Denis comes in with fervent enthusiasm. It’ll be a sell-out, at whatever price, at whatever place. It’s all rather like a revivalist meeting. America the Promised Land, wrapped up in contracts and million dollar bills and stuffed down the throats of the recalcitrant, thankless English members of the group.

  John C is most vocal in resisting the idea of an expensive, big theatre show. He wants to do it well in a smaller place. But I’m afraid Eric is right – we could fill the Hollywood Bowl.

  Monday, April 2nd

  Back to the Bijou Theatre for another viewing, with some of yesterday’s adjustments made. A tiny audience, but I enjoyed the showing much better. ‘Ben’s Cell’ scene is a strange phenomenon. It appears to be very delicately balanced at the opening. If it starts well, then there is great laughter all through, but if something goes wrong at the beginning (God knows why), it can go in silence.

  Peter Cook, with frizzed and hennaed hair, is amongst the audience. He seems to enjoy it. It must hurt, because he is so funny himself and yet has had so little success (apart from Derek and Clive records) in the last few years.

  Tuesday, April 3rd

  At the end of the day I have another Python session. This time to cover as much general ground as we can before Graham returns to Los Angeles tomorrow.

  I get to 2 Park Square West by 6.30. They’re just discussing the day’s film viewing. ‘Leper’ is back in. It just hadn’t worked without it. ‘Otto’ see-saws between condemnation and popularity. At the moment it’s in favour. When discussion comes round to appropriately silly music to be played behind JC’s dance, Graham suggests bagpipes and I suggest the bagpipes play ‘Hava Nagila’.

  The meeting now rattles on with decisions coming thick and fast. I agree to supervise the making of the soundtrack album, JC will put together a short to go out with Brian. Eric is keen to go into the merchandising, but his visionary commercial delights appeal not at all to JC, and to a lesser extent TJ, and I must admit I myself baulk at the idea of Python 10 Year mugs, which have the Queen’s face crossed out on them.

  One good and promising idea of his, though, is that Python set up its own label for the world-wide marketing of Python video cassettes – and also Python-related video cassettes, such as Yarns, Rutland Weekend and Fawlty Towers.

  To round off the evening, Iain Johnstone brings his Python documentary (shot in Tunisia) to show us. It’s ten o’clock and we’re tired, but a little high on all our discussions and decisions and dreams of the future, and Iain’s film goes down a treat. It manages to make every one of us look articulate and quite amusing, but wittily avoids being pretentious itself or allowing us to be pretentious.

  An odd therapy to all sit round and hear ourselves saying things about each other on screen which we’d never say directly!

  Wednesday, April 4th

  In the evening (free of Python meetings for once), to dinner with J Cleese. Ronnie Eyre present with JC’s psychiatrist’s wife, and Christopher Falkus of Weidenfeld’s plus wife. Superb meal of asparagus mousse and Jerusalem artichoke salad and roast beef with magnificent trimmings.

  Ronnie Eyre, blunt, sane, humorous and down to earth. An effective debunker of pretension and a man whose combination of sharp intelligence, honesty and lack of deviousness makes him a joy to listen and talk to. He says that every religious group was in part offended by his TV programme The Long Search, except for the Moslems, who took it rather well.

  I end up chatting to him about the Brian movie. He’s not surprised to hear that the Festival of Light are almost daily ringing the censor’s office. He could be a great ally if it ever came to public debate.

  Monday, April 9th

  Am up in my work-room by seven to look through the Brian book proofs and try to unblock some of the problem areas. Terry G is unhappy with the cover and wants me to try and bend Basil Pao’s1 ear on this, but TG is away in Cornwall having a week’s break with Maggie. Cleese is in Jamaica, Eric seems to have washed his hands of the book now and is in Nice, and GC’s in Los Angeles. So changes, if any, and improvements, are down to what I can think up and work out with Basil between now and lunchtime – when I have to take myself off to Devon for a day’s ‘Whinfrey’ shooting.

  Fortunately I’m feeling in quite a relaxed and creative mood and have written enough by the time Basil arrives at midday to satisfy me on several of the more problematical areas of the book. Basil, in turn, seems to be enjoying the book a little more now, after what sounds like an horrendous working experience in LA. I’m glad that Basil agrees with me on the changes – which will involve a week’s more work, but which should still enable him to make the deadlines.

  He and I leave in a cab at half past one. I to Paddington, Basil to go to the British Museum. Both of us, I think, rather pleased with ourselves.

  Tuesday, April 10th

  Drive out to Staverton Station. Heavy rain, maybe, but conditions exactly match those of March ioth (a month ago precisely), when we were last here. The shot in the train goes well. Smoking a cigar, leaning back on a soft, plush seat in a railway carriage made for Queen Victoria whilst being paid, filmed and drawn through pretty Devon villages by a steam engine is one of the perks of the job, I must say.

  Back to London by half past ten.

  Wednesday, April 11th

  At 7.30 down to Soho for a viewing of Brian (this must be around the twentieth public viewing). Terry J, with a heavy cold and semi-flu, and I are the only Pythons. But, in a small audience, Barry Took (whom it’s reassuring to see, considering his part in the birth of Python) and Yves de Goldschmidt, our natty, suave, French distributor, who greets me very warmly with the news that Grail is still running in Paris.

  ‘Otto’ has been cut entirely from the movie for this showing. An enormous improvement. Tightens the impact of the film, confines it beneficially to the major characters without going off into extraneous areas.

  Barry liked it and Goldschmidt says afterwards that he reckons it a much more intelligent film than the Grail – but posing many and greater problems for a translator.

  Out to London Airport, which is delightfully empty, and meet Al Lev off the New York flight. I’ve taken along a couple of bottles of Penrhos porter, which we crack sitting in the Mini in Car Park 3.

  Thursday, April 12th

  To Robert Maas [accountant] for a meeting at two o’clock. Oxford Street and the main West End roads swollen with people. Pre-Easter influx I suppose.

  Walk through Soho. Despite the crowds, I love its grotty eccentricity – the sex shops next door to the Chinese restaurants, the boiled duck looking very similar to the artistes on display in the strip clubs.

  John Goldstone says the censor has been along to see Brian and reckons it would be an AA, and he liked it, but he is concerned about licensing a movie against which there could be legal proceedings. He is sure that the Festival of Light will try and use the blasphemy law (upheld in the Gay News case) to try and stop the film. Lord Justice Scarman’s judgement in the Gay News case1 gives them a ridiculously wide area to play with. JG wants to be sure of the church’s attitude and so does the censor.

  Friday, April 13th

  Nancy rings from NYC. Apart from wanting me to do another Saturday Night Live stint on May 12th, she says that the Yarns are due to air on May
6th. Following an interview with me which appeared in Publishers’ Weekly in the US, the op-ed page of the New York Times wants me to write a 750-word piece on the state of the English and the elections in particular. A nice little project to take on.

  Tuesday, April 17th

  I took Anne Henshaw, Jonathan,2 Al Levinson and Helen to Leith’s Restaurant for our thirteenth anniversary meal. With wine from vines just starting to bud when we got married at Abbotsley in April 1966 – and very good food – it set me back £132, but was very jolly. Al in good form, and he and I got the giggles over Dusty Wesker’s3 quite serious offer to Al of’unattached Canadian girls’. We laughed long and loud over our Calvados.

  I think these two weeks will help Al’s rehabilitation no end. He has a naturally warm and sunny side and this warm and sunny Easter is bringing him out of a dark and gloomy winter shell.

  Anyway, we left Leith’s in high spirits. Would say Helen and I are as together as we’ve ever been. (This could be the beginning of the end – ed.)

  Friday, April 20th

  After some early work on letters, etc, I took Thomas and Louise over to Shepperton Studios.

  Alexander Korda1 would turn in his grave if he could see the first sight that greeted me as I turned into the front gate of the studio – half the lawn outside the big house has been torn up and the cedar tree – symbol of the comfort, space and style of Shepperton – now ringed by a preserving fence and standing forlornly marooned as the builders hustle around it.

  Inside the studios, on the other hand, Korda would feel quite at home. Every available piece of space is being utilised.

  We watched the Titanic being sunk on H Stage, which had been flooded all over to a depth of five feet with one and a quarter million gallons of water – direct from the nearby reservoir. Polystyrene ice floated on freshwater sea, ruffled occasionally by wave machines. Props boys and chippies in rubber diving suits busied around in the water, and dozens of extras looked convincingly tired and cold as they waited in the lifeboats for something to happen.

  Then we were shown a wonderfully elaborate space set for Saturn Three, and Louise sat in Farrah Fawcett Major’s chair.

  The movies being made here are now American or Lew Grade2-financed blockbusters – there’s nothing small about them – and the telegrams pinned to the SOS Titanic noticeboard in the production office chilled me to the marrow. They were from Hollywood and ran on the lines of: ‘Have just seen the 15-minute assembly. I was moved, awed and excited by the tremendous brilliance of the material. You are creating a true masterpiece …’ etc, etc. The schmaltz and sincerity dripped onto the floor like cream from an over-filled cake.3

  Saturday, April 21st

  Talk with TJ on the phone. Last Wednesday night he was attacked by an old gent in Soho who asked him where Charing Cross Station was. When he told him, the old man called our director ‘a lying bastard’ and belaboured him with his stick. TJ’s head was cut and bleeding. A ‘passer-by’, who TJ thinks may have been a plainclothes man from the Metropolitan force, leapt on the old bloke and hauled him off to the nick. Apparently he had just attacked someone else further up the street.

  Sunday, April 22nd

  Long sleep. Rise just before ten. But a long recuperative day is not on the cards. TJ rings to ask me if I could spare time today to have another look at the ‘Ben’s Cell’ scene. Although I bridle at the idea of endless re-editing, I think this is useful. There is something about ‘Ben’ which seems to hold it back from being as funny as it should and could be.

  Collect Al L from Jack Cooper’s house in Hampstead.1 Jack, as I am discovering rapidly, is the Very Life Force itself. Last night he was grinding Al through a guided tour of six or seven malt whiskies. By Al’s account Jack went to bed quite blotto, but was up at seven for three hours’ birdwatching on the Heath. He spotted a Greater Crested Grebe and was delighted. This afternoon he’s taking us to Lord’s – he’s a member of the MCC, of course.

  I take Al home to unload, then we go on to Covent Garden. It’s lovely and quiet around the Garden this Sunday morning – a good time to show it off. Al is impressed. We choose new takes of’Ben’, which improve the scene, I think.

  Monday, April 23rd

  Builders, phone calls, electrician. One of those all too frequently frenetic days at No. 4. I race around the house like a mad scientist trying to prevent the destruction of the world. Al, over in No. 2, gets some writing done. Unblocks that creative side which he has kept tight closed since Eve’s death. So he’s in good form.

  At lunchtime, after I’ve taken Rachel up to the swings, a lead-grey sky suddenly opens up. Hailstones, leaky kitchen – the works.

  J Goldstone tells me that EMI are re-releasing Holy Grail on a nationwide basis with Blazing Saddles. Fifty-fifty at the box office, and the whole double-bill could be worth £400,000. So EMI are backing Python after all.

  Tuesday, April 24th

  Work on my New York Times article on the election. It gradually comes together during a spotty morning’s work. It’s not easy to cut oneself off and concentrate during school hols.

  Nancy sends me a telegram telling me that, with my Concorde track record, I should embark on a boat for NYC now to arrive in time for Saturday Night Live on May 12th. So they do want me. I accept the news with a few misgivings. Something deep down says don’t do it.

  Thursday, April 26th, Southwold

  Buckle down to another journalistic task – this time 750 words for Variety – they want a Python piece to go in their Cannes Film Festival issue. Write it between nine and eleven. It comes easily, whereas the NYT article kept trapping me, by its status and ‘importance’, into trying to be heavy and significant.

  I had spent an hour in bed this morning contemplating my SNL appearance, and had decided that I should begin my novel on May 5th as planned, and that SNL would not be progress forward, but a repetition of something I’d done as best I could anyway.

  Armed with all these and other supportive arguments, I rang Nancy this evening to ask her to get me released from the show. There was a long and pregnant silence and Nancy finally desperately told me that she couldn’t get in touch with them. Lome and Jean and everyone had settled everything then left for European holidays.

  Funnily enough, Nancy’s decisiveness must have struck on some equally deep desire of mine to go to New York. I suddenly thought, well, if I have to do it, I’ll do it and be positive about it. Armed with this new frame of mind, I don’t feel nearly as bad about my volte-face! My ‘conversion’ was helped by a talk with Howard Goldberg of the NYT who was very happy with the article and is leading the op-ed page with it tomorrow – Friday 27th.

  Friday, April 27th

  Joe McGrath phones early, as I’m typing up the Variety piece. He’s hustling me to do a commercial. Uses many techniques when I say no – ‘They wanted either you or Peter Sellers or Stanley Baxter. I wanted you.’ Etc, etc. Eric has recently done one for their company … But I stand firm and he uses his last card, which is loot. He’ll still, if I don’t mind, get the agency to ring my agent. What persistence.

  Meal at Anne Henshaw’s. She’s 38 today.

  Home to find Kelly, our baby-sitter, has been rung by John Cleese, who was stuck in Hull without a Good Food Guide] Kelly had to look through and find him somewhere. No luck!

  Saturday, May 5th

  Rachel is the first one to remember my 36th birthday. Shyly she potters into our bedroom around eight. Helen gives me the new Joseph Heller book, Good as Gold, as well as ‘The Book of Lists’ and a hammer.

  Simon Albury arrives with a cake and forty candles just in case. SA announces his intention of trying Gestalt therapy – just once. Then Terry Gilliam arrives and I have an impromptu birthday party. Simon A is busily trying to sell Gilliam his idea for a ‘Gilliam World’ park – like Disneyworld, only nastier.

  I leave for New York tomorrow for yet another SNL – and rather wearily start packing just before midnight.

  Thursday, May 10th,
New York

  Down to NBC Studios. Reassuring old 8H. Big, clumsy and un-modern – it’s a joy in the middle of all these glass and steel air-conditioned silences. NBC is going through rough times in the ratings war, but this is considered to be a ‘good’ process, which will lay bare the waste and reveal it as the only network with some soul and independence.

  Tape, and write, my promotional announcements. I never enjoy being stuck up there in a vast empty studio at midday, having to say Saturday Night Live very fast many times. It’s the selling bit of the week.

  They’re finished by two and suddenly I feel a surge of well-being and in a buoyant mood I begin to write the sort of monologue I wanted to write last January, and for most of this week, but couldn’t. Now a nice fantasy forms itself, with good jokes and one liners – more like the Oxford or Cambridge Union speeches.

  Belushi, big and panting like a steam engine at a station, sprawls round my dressing room. We talk about groupies. Belushi blows, wheezes, scratches his crutch and confides that ‘I’m only fucking my wife now’. I concur and we agree only to fuck each other’s wives.

  The work in progress on the monologue is brought to a temporary halt by more media exposure. I’m driven over to some studio somewhere for a show hosted by an actor called Robert Klein – a brisk, dark, intense-looking man who has just picked up a Tony nomination. He’s talking to three guests on his one and a half hour (with commercials) show: Jerry Garcia of a seminal and long-lasting West Coast group called the Grateful Dead, Clive Davis of Arista and myself. There is an audience of forty or fifty kids packed in a small studio, in which the air conditioning has failed.

  Jerry Garcia is big, bearded and looks and sounds deep and rich. He freely bandies words like extrapolate and seems to need no help so I slope off to a small back studio and continue to scribble the monologue.