So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  This took place at the Station Hotel, Auckland, midwinter, 1964, and I was nearly twenty-five years old. When I was in New Zealand in 2006, I met Ann again, and I was pleased and proud that such a lovely and kind woman had been my first love. Thank you, Ann.

  While we were in Dunedin we were hugely surprised to receive an official, entirely serious invitation to take our show on to New York. We were bewildered. Who in America knew about us? We stared at each other, shrugged . . . and agreed. It made no sense, but then that seemed the normal state of affairs in New Zealand. To my relief, my notional employers, the BBC, proved very relaxed about when I might return. The arrangement was that we would fly to the States when we finished in Auckland, and open three weeks later on Broadway.

  Just before we set off, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation invited us all to see the TV recording they had made of our last performance in Auckland. I had never seen myself on videotape (or film) before. This may seem hard to believe, but the world back in 1964 had few replay facilities: if you missed a film when it was on in the cinema, there was no way of seeing it again, unless the studio decided to re-release it fifteen years later; there was no way you could record TV shows for later viewing; and the only video recordings in existence sat in the vaults of TV companies on the off-chance that they wanted to repeat a programme after it had first been transmitted.

  So to see myself on screen for the first time was the most terrible shock. I had had no clue how awkward and strange I looked, and I shuddered to think that West End audiences had nightly watched this weird apparition. First, when I spoke I had such a stiff upper lip that I scarcely moved my mouth: I resembled a third-rate ventriloquist; then my hand and arm gestures were so cramped it looked as though my elbows were stapled to my hips; and, silliest of all, when I hurried across the stage, the lower half of me floated about like a hovercraft, while my top half swayed to and fro, giraffe-style.

  It was almost impossible to believe this ‘thing’ was me. But once I had got over the shock, it proved to be the most useful feedback I ever received. I immediately started working on all my movements: exaggerating and relaxing my lips when speaking, enlarging my gestures, and learning how to walk more conventionally. I had only three weeks before my American debut, but I practised hard and my mirror told me I was improving. Nobody noticed, of course, but at least I knew that I was on my way to behaving a little more normally. On stage, at any rate . . .

  * * *

  fn1 Unless you were in the Peter O’Toole production at the Old Vic.

  Chapter 9

  TWO DAYS LATER, we got back on a BOAC airliner and headed for New York, where we were allotted rooms in a slightly cheesy hotel just off Times Square, the noisiest, busiest, most crowded acre of seething humanity we’d ever set eyes on. I thought London was cosmopolitan, but what amazed me about Manhattan was the unbelievable variety of faces on the sidewalks. It made Soho look like Cheltenham. And everything was so huge – you looked down Park Avenue towards the old Pan Am Building and the scale of the skyscrapers so dwarfed Regent Street you felt you were on a different planet.

  We soon started rehearsals. No one at the theatre seemed to know much about the show, but we felt relaxed and confident, with a long London run behind us (and rave reviews from New Zealand, ha ha). It therefore took us about two hours before we sensed something was wrong. We had been casually rehearsing different parts of the show for the benefit of the stage staff, when we noticed several shadowy figures moving around in the stalls, having rather loud conversations. This was not rehearsal etiquette, so we asked for quiet while we were running dialogue, but we got none. When we enquired who the interlopers were, we were told, ‘The backers’ – meaning the investors in the show. And apparently they were rattled. Word had filtered back that the show was ‘too English’. A full rehearsal was requested the next morning, before we had the chance to have the requisite full technical rehearsal. We pointed out that they could assess the show better if it had been rehearsed properly but their panic had taken over. We were bewildered. Why had they invited us to Broadway if they knew nothing at all about the content of the show?

  Nobody can remember what really happened next, because the following few days were so panicky and frenzied that everything became a blur. The investors let it be known that about twenty-five per cent of the show had to be replaced – a quarter! – in the few days we had left before opening. I was not too badly affected as all but one of my sketches (Regella) were deemed acceptable; but Humphrey, Bill, Tim and Graham had to go into an inspired creative frenzy. We got permission from some Oxford guys called Terry Palin and Michael Jones to use a sketch they had written that we’d come across where three stooges illustrate various slapstick jokes involving planks and custard pies, while a lecturer explains the mechanics of the jokes (a sketch which finished up later in the Python stage show); Graham remembered an old Footlights wrestling match where one wrestler fails to turn up, leaving the other to fight himself (also to become a standard Python routine); and best of all, Bill, Johnny, Tim and David came up with a wonderful Beatles version of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, which turned into an absolute show-stopper. We dug up a few other old sketches and quickies from the past, cobbled them all together into a radically new running order in an insanely short period of time and somehow managed to produce out of our maelstrom of nerves an opening night that received a tremendous reception. It was such an extraordinary achievement given the time available that we stood at final curtains soaking up the applause, but also stunned that we had pulled off this theatre miracle. Our only regret was that we had to admit that the ‘investors’ had actually helped us make the show better. Bastards . . .

  So off we all trooped to Sardi’s, where Broadway opening nights were traditionally celebrated, popped champagne corks, and generally behaved in a very un-English orgy of relief and astonishment and self-congratulation; and then the volume of noise began to fade, ever so slowly at first, and then to a murmur, a hush, and – finally – silence. One man, with a long, long face, was standing in the middle of the room holding up a sheet of newspaper – it was an early, smuggled version of the review of our show in the New York Times. People gathered round it and fell silent.

  The review was not good. In fact, it was pretty dismissive. ‘The visitors behave’, the critic wrote, ‘as if they are sure that what they are doing, singing or saying is hilarious, but what emerges seems obvious or purposeless.’

  I have never seen a party pooped so effectively. The crowds melted away and the cast, lost and dismayed, asked, ‘But surely there will be other reviews that will reflect the audience’s enthusiasm?’ And, indeed, there were. But we were Brits; we didn’t understand. A bad review in the New York Times – in New York that spelt D-E-A-T-H. The situation was not recoverable.

  The next night the audience was even better – tremendous! But, so what? The decision to close the show in three weeks was taken. The best critic in New York, Walter Kerr, wrote a rave review of the show to try to keep us alive. It appeared the day after we closed.

  Twenty-four years later another New York Times review all but killed off a film of mine. ‘It’s not easy to describe the movie’s accumulating dimness or to understand what went wrong’, the critic wrote, before concluding, ‘A Fish Called Wanda seems to have turned into a private joke to be enjoyed only by the members of the cast and crew who made it.’ Fortunately, this particular enterprise survived the critical mauling.

  However, things can move very fast in New York, and no sooner was the show declared dead than it was being revived. A Washington Square supper-club theatre called Square East invited us to perform the show there, and we reopened just four days after we closed on Broadway. It was a delightful, warm, rather classy club, where people dined as they watched a shortened version of our performance, and after the usual rushed transfer and rehearsal period – the stage itself was much smaller and the staging of the show much simpler – I discovered to my surprise I much preferred performing there
to playing at our Broadway theatre.

  In retrospect this may seem absurd but I think it says quite a lot about my attitude to show business. For a start, the strict rules of ‘legitimate’ theatre did not apply, so I was able to change into my performing outfit in my hotel, walk twenty minutes to the theatre, arrive five minutes before the show opened and more or less go straight on stage, without any of the nonsense about make-up. Best of all, the much smaller room required far less voice projection, and allowed a more naturalistic performance, free from the slightly operatic exaggeration of expression and gesture that seemed necessary in a 1,100-seat theatre. It took me a few performances to adapt to this new style (almost by a process of osmosis) and by the time I had, I noticed that I was enjoying doing the show more than I ever had before. This more relaxed mode of comic acting chimed in with my natural aesthetic instincts in a way that I’d not expected; and because the venue felt less demanding, performance anxiety was reduced to an absolute minimum. I’ve never had so much fun. I also began to sense that I was becoming funnier.

  Of course, I may well have been the first actor in history to have preferred being Off-Broadway to being On it, and I suspect that says a lot about my lack of performing ambition. For example, it never occurred to me to take lessons in acting (or in singing, or dancing). I did not view the world as an actor does, and I never thought of myself as one, although I certainly enjoyed getting laughs from the audiences at Square East. But I saw no future in it. As far as fame was concerned, it never crossed my mind. I did not know where my life was taking me and, looking back, I seemed to be quite unconcerned about it. After all, I had a job waiting for me in BBC radio, writing and producing, and if that went askew, I could always fall back on teaching.

  I certainly liked New York, and I loved the feeling of freedom it gave me. It’s hard to explain, but I felt anonymous in a way that was completely liberating. Why had I not felt this in London? Nobody knew me there either, but there I seemed to carry some vague feeling of being watched – of needing to be on my best behaviour so that I would not be reported to . . . to whom? Perhaps it was just a lower-middle-class anxiety about respectability. But it certainly vanished in New York.

  One morning, after I had been in New York for a couple of months, I woke up in my hotel on Lexington Avenue and 48th Street (where I was paying $30 a week for my room), worked out in the hotel gym, had a swim in its pool, and then wandered out to buy a New York Times to catch up on the world. I skimmed the front page and something caught my eye – the date. It was Tuesday 27 October 1964. My birthday. I was twenty-five. So I went off and had a lovely celebratory lunch at my favourite restaurant. I was perfectly happy to be on my own. While I enjoyed company, I didn’t seem to need it, and I saw little of the Cambridge Circus team each day until we came together in the evenings to perform.

  When I did socialise, it was with people I’d met in New York; and two of them were to become very important in my life. The first was a management consultant called Nick Walt, whom I met at a party; he worked with the Boston Consulting Group, although he was from a different Boston, in Lincolnshire. He was insanely polite and overbearingly considerate, but when you could trick him into talking about himself, he revealed an intriguing and offbeat way of looking at life, which included, for example, making graphs of his romantic relationships. When he analysed things – which was all the time – they took on an exponential complexity; I told him that if he wrote a report for the Boston Consulting Group about what he had for breakfast, it would come out resembling a Russian novel. But what I liked – indeed, loved – about this man was that he was a passionate supporter of the Somerset county cricket team. Now, to conjure up genuine enthusiasm for the antics of such a comprehensively hopeless bunch of underdogs and ne’er-do-wells was hard enough for someone born and brought up in Somerset; but to choose them voluntarily, when there was absolutely no kind of geographical loyalty involved, was an act of such utter pointlessness that I felt rather in awe of Nick. I had been reading about existentialism; here was someone living it, someone who accepted the concept of an act of Free Will in a Meaningless Universe, and was taking it to a new level.

  Given Nick’s take on the world, it was with some surprise that I learned that he was about to attend the Harvard Business School. But then I realised that, in a meaningless universe, going into business makes a lot of sense. When all values are in doubt, even Pascal might agree that making money is the best bet.

  I had, however, misunderstood Nick’s motives. He was learning all the precepts of business so that he could turn his back on them. Having once described to me how Harvard taught him what a brilliant ‘operation’ McDonald’s was, with its universal standardisation carefully eliminating any trace of individuality or spontaneity, he went ahead and bought . . . an artists’ materials shop in London, L. Cornelissen & Son, which he has run ever since.

  For anyone who has not yet got Nick’s joke, I should explain that artists’ materials resist attempts to standardise them more strongly than any other products known to man. This pigment, called Russian Real White, is made in Vladivostok by frying the wings of the White Admiral butterfly with mugwort pollen and ermine fur, in an oil made by crushing a rare kind of gravel found only in the Bering Strait; this other white, next to it, and apparently indistinguishable from it, called Butterworth Raw White, is a mixture of bleached Umbrian pasteurised talcum powder and fossilised Etruscan snow, baked in meerschaum clay over a mesquite grill and then frozen for twelve years in a glacier; and this white (the shade of which is halfway between the whites already described), which is called Not Off White, can only be obtained by importing it from mines on one of the outer moons of Neptune. So Nick, who has spent the last forty years trying to systematise the storage of over 7 million of these pigments, has in fact merely been thumbing his nose at Harvard and its money-grubbing Brush Salesman culture. I think you can see why I love him.

  And there’s another reason, too. I have to thank Nick for my first proper romantic relationship. Let me swiftly explain, before you get the wrong idea.

  Early on in our friendship, Nick took me for lunch to a restaurant on 3rd Avenue called the Living Room. It was rather dark and loungey, but it offered a very good buffet: ‘All You Can Eat: $3.49’. As I was living on $15 a day, the place was a useful ‘find’. But I couldn’t get Nick to concentrate on our conversation, because he kept glancing at, and making admiring comments about, my future bride. Eventually she came over to see if we needed more iced water, and chatted briefly to us, and went away, and I agreed with Nick that she was very charming and attractive, and then I agreed with him again, and a third time, and then did my best to discourage him from proposing when she brought the check.

  However, a few days later, for a reason that now escapes me, I went back to the Living Room to splash out $3.49 on lunch, and found myself chatting with Connie Booth again. I learned that all the waitresses there were looking for acting work, and so we talked about theatre and I mentioned the show I was appearing in at Square East. On my next visit – the following day – I took a book called Laughter by Henri Bergson because I thought I might impress her if she saw me reading a French philosopher. (Remember I was painfully naive.) Finally Nick and I had another lunch there together and we invited Connie to see the Cambridge Circus show.

  The evening she came did not start well. The opening number of the show involved all the cast running out on to the stage and singing a jolly end-of-the-pier song:

  It’s the end of the show!

  It’s time now to go,

  We hope we’ve brought you laughter and joy,

  So until we see you all . . . next year!

  It’s goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

  And then we all bowed and waved and left the stage, except for David Hatch, who stepped forward and said, ‘Well, as you can see, there have been one or two changes in the running order of the show’, which I always liked, as a silly, upbeat way of getting things started.

  Connie took on
e look at me as I stood there, ‘singing’ and ‘dancing’, and – as I later learned – thought to herself in horror, ‘Oh no! Oh God! He’s terrible!’ And, of course, I was terrible – absolutely terrible, since I have no musical ability at all; indeed I was so aware of my ineptitude that the results of my natural lack of talent were made even worse by my acute self-consciousness about it.

  So as I pranced about the stage like a wounded heron, Connie started making plans to escape the dinner that we had arranged for afterwards: perhaps she could just disappear, leaving a note that her mother had been hit by a bus in Jakarta and that she didn’t know when she would be back; perhaps she could feign an attack of lockjaw when we arrived at the dinner table; anything, anything to avoid the moment when she would have to make some comment about my performance skills.

  And then, as she sat there enduring an agony of embarrassment, I reappeared on the stage to do a sketch with David Hatch (when I vetted him for a job with the Secret Service) and my battiness made her laugh a lot, and so everything was all right in the end, even though at dinner afterwards she hardly understood a word Nick and I said, because we ‘talked so fast in our English accents’ . . .

  And so, with great decorousness, Connie and I started to see each other regularly. We loved talking together and I think we both knew we might be in a serious relationship.

  I remember that I was surprised to learn how much of Connie’s time was taken up by auditions. In the fourteen months since I’d left Cambridge I’d never done one, so I was very amused when, two weeks later, I was asked to read for a role. Although the Cambridge Circus cast had been represented by a New York theatrical agency while we were on Broadway, we were sure that none of the agents really knew who we were. But one of them called, and told me I’d been invited to audition for a British show that was coming to Broadway in the New Year: Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele. I just laughed and laughed and felt I couldn’t resist: the idea that I could tell Bill and Tim that I was auditioning for a Broadway musical was going to be well worth the humiliation involved. Unlike Dudley Moore’s one-legged man auditioning for the role of Tarzan, I was not expecting to land the job.