When putting my head under the blanket wouldn’t quite give my voice the right quality, or the kitchen utensils weren’t quite cutting it as massive steel girders, I could always call upon the BBC Sound Effects Library and its amazing arsenal of 33-rpm records. You didn’t even have to sign them out. It was run on an honour system, where they trusted you to bring everything back, and there were only a couple of guys working in the whole department, so the cost of doing it was much less than the cost of running that BBC department now, what with the endless reams of paperwork and the numbers of paper-pushers needed to push them around. The rest of the Pythons helped out a lot too. Once the show was up and running I’d corner them in a corridor and get them to perform my dialogue into my little tape-recorder, which I could then incorporate into the next batch of animations.
Carnivalesque Lettering.
It was very exciting to be part of a group and see something we were working on gradually coming together – especially for me, because the other five had all known each other previously, whereas I was the foreigner who’d come all this way to suddenly be in this place where people actually got what I did. I was happy to be the butt of their jokes about my linguistic infelicities, on the understanding that we seemed to share the same comedic world-view. Whether this was actually true or not, I felt it was, and nothing gives you confidence like the feeling that you’ve found your audience.
This feeling of euphoria was magnified once I got to see people actually watching my animations. Shooting the debut series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had inevitably been quite a fragmented and uncertain business. Even by the time we got to the first recording at BBC TV Centre at the end of August 1969, no one – least of all any of us – quite knew how the whole thing was going to fit together. It was only when the animations came in that you understood the context for much of the other stuff. (Or was it the other way round?) And because a lot of the people on the show had been seen before, but the cartoons were kind of the fresh thing, once the first series started to go out, a lot of the spotlight with regard to what was new and exciting about it seemed to fall on me.
George Melly wrote a wonderful piece comparing me to Max Ernst – thank you very much, I’ll take it! But by the time I was getting asked on Late Night Line-Up with Mike and Terry J. to be interviewed by Joan Bakewell, I was actually starting to panic a bit. I’d never dreamed of scaling such heights, and I just thought ‘I’ve got to get my feet back on the ground’, so I ran off to Morocco for a couple of weeks, where I was reasonably confident no one would know who I was.
I’d always known I wanted recognition – that monster was never not lurking within – but suddenly I was breathing the rarified air of Late Night Line-Up, and this did slightly terrify me. It’s much easier not to sell your soul when no one wants to buy it, and I’ve always been afraid my resolve might weaken if I ever gave it a chance. In fact, that fear has probably been the only thing that’s protected me from myself, along with the benevolence of my inability to secure myself a bottomless-pocketed patron . . . my armour is thick.
The danger of becoming a successful person is that you’re then supposed to be able to replicate whatever it was which brought you that success. And the requirement to be able to do it again can start to feel like a terrible pressure. Harry Nilsson might not be the best example of this, but he is someone who I would say had it all – to the extent of almost being a genius – and yet the biography I was reading recently showed him falling into a spiral of drink and drugs that felt like a direct by-product of his achievements. That’s why I’ve worked so hard over the years not to become too consistently successful – because it’s safer that way.
When I started cropping up in village idiot roles, it wasn’t so much a conscious decision to bring me into the fold but rather a product of me getting bored. I would work away all night on my own then come in with my cans of film and see everybody else having a good time, so I started putting on whatever costume nobody else wanted to wear and being the knight with the rubber chicken. None of the others knew whether I had any skills as a performer – they hadn’t seen my Chekhov, or my green-coloured ogre at the children’s theatre – and whereas I always had (and still do have) a tremendous admiration for their gifts as actors, my own ambitions in that area never extended beyond chipping in with the odd peculiar grotesque.
There was a painful time on one of the Python shows where I was given the role of an American dialogue coach. I was just supposed to jump in and say ‘No, it’s OK’ in a very strong American accent, but it kept coming out British. This might seem strange to anyone who’s heard me talk recently, but how I spoke then was very different to how I speak now, because the longer I’ve lived here, the less English I’ve tended to sound.
In my early years of living in this country, every time I opened my mouth I was expecting people to say, ‘Why don’t you just go back where you came from?’ Not that they actually would, but it was definitely an anxiety that was there in my head. In those circumstances, it was only natural that the process of linguistic osmosis, which always takes place when you spend a lot of time with people, should speed up a bit as far as the other Pythons were concerned.
I’m sure the same thing happened to them when they were at university. They all came from different parts of the country originally, but by the time they left Oxford and Cambridge, Received Pronunciation had all five of them in its grip. Enunciation was the thing I struggled with, whereas the Pythons were incredibly precise in the way they spoke. After a certain amount of time in their company you’d inevitably find yourself (or at least I would) talking a bit more crisply, and next thing you know you’re spitting those ‘t’s out really clearly, like you’re in Brief Encounter. But then when you’re not working with them so much any more, your unconscious just says ‘Fuck it’, and you can revert back to your inner Minnesotan farm-boy.
Jester’s cap and bells, optional; non-speaking roles a speciality; Michael Palin Knee attachment, model’s own.
Alongside his many other gifts, this capable feline also learned to straddle so he could see in my human toilet rather than the cat litter box … a trick which Jinxy, the cat in MEET THE PARENTS, would later emulate to global acclaim.
By the time the Flying Circus was properly up and running, Glenys and I had moved down the route of the number 14 bus from Ovington Square to a flat near Putney Bridge. Python was only paying standard BBC money at that stage, but it was already nice to be able to pay the rent. The flat was in a modern block and we were always bumping into Kenny Everett – then a Radio 1 DJ and producer of The Beatles’ 1968 Christmas single – who lived on a floor below us. He was a very funny guy, who never complained about the noise as my studio door became the punch-bag for my deadline-related frustrations (eventually there wasn’t much more than a hinge left).
It wasn’t just my neighbours who were on the up. I’d bought myself a Morris Minor convertible for £35 before Python began, and I upgraded to a Triumph Spitfire when the BBC payments started to roll in. But when Glenys and I split up shortly after Python started, she got the Triumph and I got the flat (although she did also come back and take the vacuum cleaner).
The other important possession I got to keep was the Siamese cat that defeats the Killer Cars in the Python animation. It was just called ‘Cat’ – I never asked him his name – but I remember my dad being over from America and holding him up for the photograph I took, ‘. . . as he rampages through London’. Siamese cats are really smart – a fine example of the breed. John Cleese had his sibling, so it was kind of a Python-esque dynasty.
Although I didn’t see it this way at the time, Glenys and my break-up was the best thing that could have happened to both of us. She ended up marrying – and having a daughter with – Dougie Hayward, tailor to the stars (and alleged inspiration for Michael Caine’s Alfie) and working as a feature writer for the Daily Telegraph and then the Mail on Sunday (where she still writes the occasional article mentioning me in studiedly neutra
l terms to this day). And I was left footloose and fancy-free at exactly the right moment to meet my wife-to-be Maggie Weston, who was working in the Monty Python make-up room – a form of employment a teenage Lon Chaney impersonator like myself had no option but to find irresistibly attractive.
Maggie, my wife, did the make-up on the python shows and then on all my films up through Munchausen. She is the one of us whose nomination got me into the Academy Award Ceremony.
This was one of the highlights of my swiftly abandoned career as a magazine illustrator … accompanying a piece by John updlike for the beautifully designed magazine Nova. The book was called Couples, so I isolated them all in seperate boxes, with their own flower for company as a tribute to their bitchy but fragrant language.
What more auspicious location could we have found for some of our early trysts than the very Torquay hotel that ended up being immortalised by John Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth as Fawlty Towers? I remember swimming in a hotel pool with Maggie late at night, her willingness to join me for a dip happily unaffected by the despotic proprietor’s unwarranted criticism of my table manners. This was definitely a good omen. I’d actually gone to a fortune teller with Connie a few years earlier on my first ever location trip with Python (both being Americans, we had no option but to be pals). Although the self-styled seer was good on our immediate futures (insisting we would be ‘heading North’ for ‘a reason to do with films’, which was dead right, as we were soon on a shoot in Bradford), she made no mention of the extent to which our diverse destinies would ultimately be shaped by Devon’s rudest hotelier.
ne of the mutual interests that brought Maggie and me together was our love of leather. She’d done a fair amount of work with various kinds of hide – whether making belts or learning to use dyes – and obviously I had my extensive sheepskin coat-painting experiences to share with her, so several of our early dates involved the pursuit of skin, as we made frequent return trips to a really good leather place on Old Street where you could buy animal hides to make things with.
Some time after the second series of Python finished – in early 1971 – we went on another escape-from-success trip, this time camping in Greece. I returned home to find a letter from Stanley Kubrick asking me to do an animated title sequence for A Clockwork Orange. Unfortunately, he needed it done within a week – a time-frame too constricting even for me – so that didn’t happen. A few years later, Kubrick contacted me again when he was preparing The Shining to see if I could help him find an art director who would work the way he wanted – i.e. with a catalogue of lintels and door frames from which Stanley could choose, before expecting his lucky employee to have a perfectly realised set drawn in something like fifteen minutes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly – this methodology was just about workable for animations, but would be a much taller order in three dimensions – none of the art directors I approached with Kubrick’s proposition wanted to go within a mile of it. I wrote Stanley a postcard saying ‘Sorry, I did try . . . ’, but heard nothing back by way of a thank you. That’d teach me to try and do something for my Paths of Glory hero.
One set of titles I did get to do was for Samuel Z. Arkoff’s CRY OF THE BANSHEE with Vincent Price. The film looked sumptuous but was actually made very cheaply by recycling all the costumes from Anne of the Thousand Days. In the same environmentally friendly spirit, I went to town with my felt tips on a bunch of Albrecht Dürer engravings. Why should I learn to draw like him when I could just cut them out and move them around? I wasn’t stealing from him – it was an act of respect and love . . . plus he was long dead and therefore out of copyright.
My own chance to find out how many different ways there are to upset and disappoint people as a film director would come as a side-effect of the endlessly proliferating Python virus. In the early days, there was nothing we could do to upset people, however hard we tried. Pretty much everything we did was ‘inappropriate’, but since no one knew the word yet, we were getting off scot-free.
People were constantly asking us to do things and Eric Idle was particularly good at starting projects and then pissing off on holiday and leaving everyone else to do the work. Everyone else, in the case of Monty Python’s Big Red Book– the first in a long line of Python publications – being me, Mike, Terry J., and most of all Terry’s sister-in-law Katy Hepburn, who was by that stage working as my assistant on the animations.
My earlier experiences in the snark-infested waters of comedy book publishing – with The Cocktail People and various still-born successors in LA in the late sixties – had not been positive ones, but my initial reluctance to get involved began to melt away once I realised this was an opportunity to bring some of the sensibility of the American underground comics boom I’d missed out on through being in London to a new British audience. By the time we were on our second volume, The Brand New Monty Python Bok, we were really having fun with it – one of our favourite innovations was printing dirty thumb-prints on the otherwise pristine cover so it would make book shops go crazy.
‘The man with giant legs’ – one example of me having fun in THE BRAND NEW MONTY PYTHON BOK, which the booksellers didn’t complain about.
A number of them did insist on returning stock claiming ‘this is soiled’, and the same mentality of trying to extrapolate from the playful Out of the Inkwell-type attitude of the original show would prevail in pretty much all subsequent Python spin-off activities. I had great fun working on some of the albums. After André Jacquemin had recorded the sketches, he and I added the lush FX and atmospheric production with a combination of his four-track and my two-track tape recorders in his parents’ garden shed. I would also like to claim credit for the idea of the three-sided album – 1973’s The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief – where side two had double grooves spiralling inside each other, so depending on where the needle came down, you would go into one sequence of tracks or the other. Things were coming together so fast that I’m not absolutely sure it was my idea, but I would like to claim the credit for it anyway.
A later album corer I did for Monty Python Sings – it was my version of the Rolling Stones’ logo with the stave turning into a guitar string mouth-tightener.
What was interesting as the show developed was that although each of us had his own specialities and strengths, we were all learning from each other as we went along. So sometimes I’d notice my animation becoming more verbose in an attempt to emulate what the others were doing, but in the same episode there might be a sketch that had picked up trace elements from my cartoons.
As Monty Python grew in popularity, the demand for live shows became impossible to ignore. On the one hand, this was exciting because it gave me the opportunity to do more performing, and the custard pie sketch required a level of subtlety I could just about master. (John always thought I mugged too much, but he could keep his arty notions . . . I got laughs, and that was what I thought we were in business to achieve.) On the downside, there was one bit early on in the first stage show where I had to vomit into my top hat and then step forward to give a little speech, and which I would struggle not to fuck up. Thankfully this was eventually dropped.
A version of the artwork also featured on Monty Python Sings (again) in 2014.
I found the repetitious nature of performing onstage night after night unfulfilling, but it was fun to be part of the fan frenzy – especially when Python started to go international. As our slightly uptight cerebral take on the British invasion pushed out from its initial Canadian bridgehead and eventually into America, we knew we were breaking fresh ground, and it was exciting to be treated like rock stars (although comedy groupies were a very different animal to the rock star variety – far less beautiful, but they had a lot of personality, and we owed them a great debt of thanks for helping us keep our vows of celibacy).
There was certainly an element of ‘us against the world’ about Monty Python on tour, but our arrival in town was a far cry from the Viking raids of Led Zeppelin or
The Who. After the shows, we tended to go off on our own and read our books or write our diaries, rather than hurling ourselves into Dionysian gang-bangs. It was nice to feel like stars for a while, but once you’ve had a few standing ovations and all that shit, the thrill wears off pretty quickly, unless you’re one of those people who needs to hear applause to remind them that they’re still alive.
Of the group, I think Eric was the one who liked that kind of approbation the most, which is probably why he still lives in Hollywood. But Monty Python was never about one individual, it was always about the six of us, which I think made the pressure much easier for us all to cope with. The great advantage of hitting it as big as we did collectively rather than individually was that we all took the piss out of each other, and that helped keep us as grounded as we were ever going to get.
Obviously we all ended up trying to prove ourselves on our own in one way or another – with varying degrees of success – but because John was the first one to go solo (when he left the TV show after the third series, although obviously he came back in for the films), I think he suffered a lot. He went higher, faster, than the rest of us, and therefore he had further to fall. The fall has always been the thing I’m terrified of. Hence the low altitude of my flying dreams – Icarus was not my role model. If you just never quite get where you’re aiming for, the chances are you won’t hurt yourself so badly when you tumble back down to earth.
In Germany again – this time playing a ‘Mouse boy’ (note Palin in customary ‘peering’ guise). I had to ride in on my horse twirling my tiny lasso, then as I threw it, we cut to this little mouse which I was meant to be catching and then, woah, I would be pulled from the horse by the teeny rodent. I was quite big on doing stunts but, foolishly, this gun was a real metal one – not rubber, like stunt-men normally use – and landing on it as the horse bolted brought back painful memories of bruises from the demon motorcycle of yore.
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