I do a 20-minute chat with Klein. He’s easy, informed and intelligent with a good sense of humour. One of the two or three best people who’ve ever interviewed me on Python matters.1
Saturday, May 12th, New York
Sleep well. I don’t suffer from nerves on account of the show quite so much now. I think my experience with the monologue last January at least convinced me that even if the worst happened there would always somehow be a show. Breakfasted – for the first time this week – on the full works – eggs and bacon, etc.
At dress rehearsal the show is well over half an hour too long and feels heavy and much more hit and miss than my previous two shows. With less than an hour to go before air, Lome begins his selection process. Two or three sketches are cut (one, a Nerds piece about Mr Brighton arriving with a Pakistani wife, I had never liked) and cuts are made within a long pirate spoof, ‘Miles Cowperthwaite’.
I do not react well when Lome sends Al Franken down to my dressing room to cut the monologue. Lome’s touch, however positive, is nearly always delicate, and to send poor Al down with 55 minutes left before I have to go on – and to have him put his pencil through whole chunks of what I spent most of the later part of the week writing, is a most uncharacteristic and tactless move.
At 11.35, after Belushi’s cold opening, as I wait behind the tacked-up scenery flats, only a half-inch of plywood separating me from the Great American Public, Lome threads his way through the old scenery and counsels me to take it easy. ‘Look them in the eyes – they’ll like you because you’re nice.’
The monologue starts well, but half-way through some part of my brain closes off and I’m not wholly riveted to the task of communicating my jokes to the Great American Public. Instead a voice in my head queries the importance, or indeed the necessity, of what I’m doing and why I’m standing here, and suddenly I’m conscious of the silence between the laughs, rather than the laughs themselves.
But the rest of the show swings along merrily. The miracle happens again. Lome and others are complimentary about the monologue, and I cheer up considerably.
When we get to the goodnights, James Taylor, the week’s musical guest, and Billy Murray hoist me on to their shoulders. As one of the stagehands told me later, ‘It’s not every host they put on their backs.’
3.30 a.m: to Danny’s Bar – more drinking, dancing and, as dawn breaks outside, Belushi and two others start playing live. Strong, fine, noisy music. People have to spill out of the tiny bar onto the street to talk. It’s six or six thirty – a remarkable sight. The tatty bar in a storehouse and factory area, with a line of limousines waiting outside in the odd white light of a New York dawn.
Thursday, May 17th
Back to my writing room for the first time in two weeks. At the desk by a quarter to eight. And then three hours after breakfast. The novel turns into a play – which seems to rattle very easily off the typewriter – so I will blow with this wind for a while.
Saturday, May 19th
In the p.m. I have to open a fete at William Ellis School. Usually try to avoid public appearances in the local area – once you start they all want you – and anyway, the less conspicuous I am around here, the more comfortable life is. But W Ellis is the most likely school for Tom and William to go to, so I’m interested to see it. It’s on the edge of the Heath, was a boys-only grammar school, now a voluntary aid school within the comprehensive system (though still boys-only).
We are collected, en famille, by a car at a quarter to two and don’t get home until after five. I give a short opening speech, then have to walk around like the Duke of Edinburgh, with various members of the ‘committee’ at a discreet distance behind me, whilst I smile and sparkle and fail to hit anything with seven balls on the smash the crockery stall!
Tea with the headmaster in the middle of all this. He’s a short, unflashy, rather serious man, who I’m sure does his job well. I think there’ll not be much problem getting the boys in. He practically kidnapped them on the spot.
Sunday, May 27th
Take Ma to see the Tate extension. Enjoy the Rothko room this time. After a bit Ma, who has been patient, says rather touchingly ‘Before we leave, we will go and see some nice pictures, won’t we?’
Home for Sunday lunch, then a trip to the zoo between showers (all except Willy, who won’t come because it’s cruel).
To help convince Warner Bros that they were doing the right thing in backing Brian, Denis O’Brien corralled most of the Pythons into a marketing trip to Los Angeles.
Friday, June 1st
Taxi collects me soon after ten. Another Oak Village send-off, as the children cluster out in the street to wave and Tom announces to Mrs B and any others who may be around that Daddy is going to Hollywood!
The plane takes off an hour late – they’ve had to change aircraft as the first one was faulty – and we head off on a route I’m not accustomed to – straight up England, past Gospel Oak. Soon after which the pilot makes the momentou’s announcement that we are flying over Sheffield. He must have relatives there.
At LA Airport meet Graham and Bernard McKenna. Graham is at the wheel of a long, grey Cadillac, which is in itself an astonishing sight – I’ve never seen GC behind the wheel of a car in my life. But here he is, with his leased Cadillac, heading us through heavy traffic – eight lanes of cars on either side of the freeway making rather a mockery of the hair-tearings over the world fuel shortage.
The weather is dull and cool as we pull up to GC’s bungalow in Brentwood – a most salubrious-looking area of extensive houses and gardens. He pays $3,000 a month for this pleasant abode and, sitting out in the garden, sipping a Perrier and watching humming birds darting about and pointing their long noses into hibiscus and honeysuckle, it looks almost worth it.
Graham drives us back to the crumbling Chateau Marmont. It’s quite a reasonable time in LA – before midnight. But it’s dawn in England as I nod off over Evelyn Waugh’s diaries.
Saturday, June 2nd, Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles
No-one seems to have slept very well. Potter in my room until mid-morning, then go with a group of us to the Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood Boulevard, to see Alien – the Shepperton-shot, British-directed, space monster movie that is the latest to do record-breaking business in this film-hungry country.
The Egyptian Theater is a wonderful piece of extravagant decoration in itself – a lot brighter and more cheerful than the movie, which is very well directed and very creepy, up to a point, and loses its way in the last half-hour, by which time all the best shocks have happened.
Out into Hollywood Boulevard. There is nothing of the breathtaking beauty of New York about this city. Low, flat, sprawling and laid-back – like a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch.
As Basil the elegant Pao says, people come out here to Hollywood and lease a lifestyle. Here the problem is not how to cope with the difficulties of living, it’s how to cope with the ease of living.
A meeting at 5.30. People wander in about six. Graham arrives in dark suit and tie, in extraordinarily voluble form. It gradually dawns on the assembled gathering that he is ‘speeding’. Whatever he has taken has turned him into a parody of Ian MacNaughton agreeing and disagreeing without discrimination or information, but with enormous enthusiasm. It’s an extraordinary phenomenon and renders the meeting quite useless.
Two limousines arrive to take us to the Bruin Theatre in Westwood where Brian is to be ‘sneak previewed’. At the theatre we find a full house and 1,000 people turned away. Meet the Warner’s executives who are, understandably, grinning pleasurably.
John Calley, our greatest supporter and second in command at Warner’s, turns out to be a very soft-spoken, pleasant-faced, tweed-jacketed 45-50-year-old, more like an English public school headmaster than a Hollywood mogul. In fact, none of the people I’m introduced to from Warner’s are in the least bit mogulish. Not a cigar in sight in the foyer and jeans and soft jackets are the order of the night.
Mike Medavoy
– head of Orion Pictures, a chunky redhead with compellingly smiling eyes – takes Terry J out to look at the line (or queue, as we would say in the UK), stretching round the building.
Eric and Graham, meanwhile, are lurking in their limousine, waiting not to get mobbed. They eventually rush out of the limousine, heads down, and race for the door across a, by now, virtually deserted sidewalk.
But inside the theatre are sights and sounds to glad our hearts. A full house – 800 strong – and a tremendous air of anticipation. Cheers and applause as the lights eventually dim.
It’s a marvellous showing. Great laughs and applause on a scale we have not yet seen for Brian. At the end Eric leads the rush out – and gets into the wrong limousine – whilst Terry and I stand on the sidewalk and talk to one or two of the audience and those waiting – who are not of the tear-your-clothes-off fan type and want to talk quite unsensationally about the movie.
Back at the Marmont for a party (with Thai food) in Basil’s room, it’s clear that the viewing was a good one. A few people at the party. Harry Nilsson, looking very white and unhealthy by any standards, especially LA, is a father today.
Later in the evening TJ gets woken in his room by a present from Harry in the shape of a Los Angeles naughty lady.
Sunday, June 3rd, Los Angeles
Out to Graham’s long, low Brentwood residence. Still cloudy and overcast. A meeting arranged for 11.30, but no-one seems to want to get down to anything, application seeming a bit of a crime in this balmy, West Coast atmosphere.
Denis O’Brien, benign as ever, arrives with some lunch – and can hardly contain his excitement over last night. He returns to it with awe and wonder, and even he, who is one of the most level-headed men I’ve met, comes out with such assurances as ‘You know, none of your careers will be the same after last night … the way they were talking in that foyer …’
Eventually we start the meeting and become a little more down to earth discussing what is still wrong with the movie. Warner’s are worried about the stretch from ‘Leper’ to ‘Ben’. There is nothing but agreement for the ‘Otto’ cut. Graham is down from yesterday and more gently avuncular.
We discuss our attitude to censorship, on which there is total agreement within the group that we do not and will not change anything because we’re told to, unless we happen to agree that it isn’t funny anyway. We’re all happy to go to court in defence of the movie.
The day drags on into a party, which Graham has arranged for us. None of us is on best partying form. Timothy Leary, he of the drug culture, is there smiling and laughing and seeming very jolly – and again looking like a public school master. A marvellous advert for drug use.
Monday, June 4th, Los Angeles
I slept until four, then woke and stayed awake on a hard bed, streams of thoughts going through my mind – what to do with the Ripping Yarns, Saturday Night Live, what to say to Warner’s today … Then the birds started. It’s like sleeping in an aviary. Gorgeous trilling sounds, dozens of different voices – including one bird with a broad American accent calling ‘Doxeen! Doreen! Doreen!’
Well, it’s 8.35, I’m washed, dressed, bathed and going to meet John, Terrys J and G and Anne for breakfast at Schwab’s.
At the moment I feel as though I’m stuck fast in some awful enervating dream. Being slowly flattened by the insidious luxury of Hollywood life – and ready for some enormous creature to come and remove my brain and other vital organs. I must get home. It’s dreadful here. To add injury to insult my room smells of gas and I’ve been bitten quite severely by some maliciously hungry LA flea.
We drive out to Burbank Studios to talk to a small contingent (eight or nine) of Warner Bros marketing people. They are all now solidly behind the movie and have decided to give it the treatment.
Some of us, TJ especially, are concerned over the American fundamentalist Baptist backlash – after all, George Harrison, as producer, has already had letters threatening never to buy his records again – but Warner’s dismiss all this.
GC comes up with an excellent idea for Python movie No. 4 – ‘Monty Python’s World War II’. I think it could be a marvellous format for more of a sketch-type film – which everyone seems to want.
So Hollywood can be creative.
A bright end to a day that started for me in quite considerable gloom.
Tuesday, June 5th, Los Angeles
No further bites tonight and a much better sleep.
At Burbank we go first to Warner Records – a lovely, entirely wood and glass-framed low, long building.
Their marketing strategy, developed since we met yesterday, is to concentrate us all in New York for nine days – with all the press coming in from across the US to see the movie (which will have been running in NYC for two or three weeks) and climaxing with a big party.
But all their ideas and enthusiasms fuse into one great howl of approval when Eric suggests using Jeanette Charles (the Queen’s double) to spearhead a Royal 10th Anniversary of Python celebration in New York. They all absolutely love this, but, I must admit, using J Charles fills me with little enthusiasm. Eric’s used her on Saturday Night Live, and she is a rather easy, tacky option for us. Still, if handled quite straight it could be fun.
Back to Warner Records’ wooden shack for chats with Denis in an office walled with G Harrison’s gold discs. I remember, as I admire again this pleasant working environment, that this is the place which drove Derek Taylor back to England on the verge of madness.
Business chat with Denis – merchandising and the like, then out to the airport with a rather unpleasant cab driver, who admits to his dislike of black people. ‘They’re bad drivers and bad people and that’s that.’ He looks Mexican and drives appallingly.
Must get back to the novel. Eric says he’s writing a play which has turned into a novel, whereas I have a novel which has turned into a play.
Friday, June 8th
The idea of a full-length Ripping Yarn movie, based on the existing films, is crystallising in my mind. Must draft a letter to John Howard Davies and to Bryon Parkin at BBC Enterprises.
In the evening go with Helen and Willy to see Tom play recorder in the Gospel Oak concert. Large orchestra and choir; audience crammed in at the back. Fair share of laughs – someone sick at the back of the orchestra just after a child had announced that she would play’Variations on Theme of a Lark Song’.’Hava Nagila’ by the massed violins and recorders was wonderfully silly and reminded me to make sure that Python’s bagpipe version of the same song should not go unnoticed.
Tuesday, June 12th
The ‘£1 a gallon petrol’ having arrived, I decide to walk Rachel to playgroup for ecological reasons. So she and I, hand in hand, trip lightly through the dirt and dog shit down Grafton Road, dodge the lorries turning fiercely and uncompromisingly out of the Building Depot and into the little oasis of tiny people – the Camden Playgroup.
In the evening Mikoto, Helen’s Japanese badminton friend, comes to cook us a Japanese meal. The preparation is a painstaking and delicate business – as indeed is communication with Mikoto. The food – tempura I think they’re called – vegetables in batter – is quite delicious. We drink sake with it. The kids rave.
I end up eating too much. The food, the sake and the strain of four hours with someone who doesn’t speak your language or you his, is perhaps to blame for a colossal drowsiness which numbs my senses about midnight.
Stay awake long enough to see that I and other rich folk are the chief beneficiaries of the first Thatcher—Howe Tory Budget. The top rate of tax is down from 83 to 60%, dividend restraint is lifted, tax thresholds are all lifted. In short, I’m probably £10,000 a year better off after today. There is some inescapable lack of social justice in all this. But it doesn’t keep me awake.
Thursday, June 14th
Another viewing of Brian. Small audience at the Bijou Theatre – all Pythons there, bar Graham. John Mortimer1 and Oscar Beuselinck represent the law – Mortimer is to give u
s his opinion afterwards.
He’s a nice, friendly, disarming man, with small, but not at all humourless, eyes, and a ready smile. He’s clearly chuffed to be amongst such humorous company. He loves the film and reckons that we are quite safe. The chances of a jury convicting Python of blasphemy on the basis of this film are very remote, he believes – but not impossible. However, should an action be brought, Mortimer thinks it would take at least a year to come to court, by which time we’ll have hopefully made our money and our point.
Friday, June 13th
Slow journey over to Chelsea, where I arrive 25 minutes late at chic French seafood restaurant Le Souquet, for lunch with Iain Johnstone, producer of The Pythons,2 who has a proposition for me. It turns out to be the offer of host on a new BBC2 chat show which Iain is hoping to produce from October onwards for thirteen to twenty-six weeks.
My first reaction is fear – how could I cope with this world of wit and repartee? Iain tries to assuage my doubts by telling me that Brian Wenham, head of BBC2, and other BBC luminaries were all very pleased that he’d suggested my name. So I feel a bit wanted, I suppose, but still doubtful. Iain talks of it bringing me ‘real fame’. But I think if I have to have ‘real fame’, I would rather it came from acting or writing, rather than hosting a chat show.
Saturday, June 16th
Spend the morning buying bikes – one each for Tom and Willy, who are now thoroughly enjoying cycling round Gospel Oak, and one for Helen and myself to use as a family workhorse. Equipped like a tank, with voluminous wicker basket on the front and a child seat for Rachel on the back.
In the evening to a party at Eric’s – given by Chris Miller1 (Eric having returned to France) for Carrie Fisher (the heroine of Star Wars), who is renting El’s house whilst she works on a Star Wars sequel at Elstree.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 75
