So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  So I went along to the theatre and hung around backstage until I was called, at which point I walked to the lighted part of the stage and gave my name. A stage manager joined me and we read out the four or five pages of dialogue I’d been given when I’d arrived. I got a few laughs from the blackness in the orchestra stalls, because I was playing the part of a snooty upper-class English twit of the kind guaranteed to amuse Americans. And then I handed the pages back, and a voice asked:

  ‘Could you sing something?’

  ‘No.’

  This got a laugh. Pause.

  ‘. . . Just sing anything . . .’

  ‘I don’t know anything. I cannot remember tunes.’ (This was not quite true. I could remember tunes, I just couldn’t sing them. But I was keen to end the audition as soon as possible.)

  A pause. Muttering in the stalls. Then:

  ‘Well . . . could you sing your national anthem?’

  ‘All right. How does it go?’

  This got a big laugh, but they persisted, and so I gave in and sang ‘God Save the Queen’ so appallingly it should have been renamed ‘God Help the Queen’. I went home, giggling, and that night told Bill and Tim that I’d auditioned and got the part. They didn’t believe me, although I swore it was true.

  The next morning the agent called to tell me that I’d been given the role.

  The degree of my flabbergastedness beggars description: I was dumbfounded. My mind jammed. I had never even bothered to consider whether I wanted the job.

  ‘Don’t you?’ asked my agent.

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘It’s $200 a week for six months if it runs, which it probably will. You’ll rehearse here in New York, and then do a few weeks in Boston and Toronto, and then on to Broadway . . . Hello?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Your show in Washington Square closes in a few weeks, doesn’t it? What are your plans?’

  I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t have any, and, yes, it felt as though Cambridge Circus was winding down and didn’t seem likely to be going on far into the New Year.

  ‘Have you ever been in a musical before?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘It’ll be an interesting experience then.’

  And that’s what got me. True, it was only a very small part, and even someone as inexperienced as me could tell that there was nothing very special about the writing. The show was adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel Kipps about an orphan working as an apprentice in a draper’s shop, who has a childhood sweetheart named Ann. By a stroke of good luck, Kipps comes into a fortune and then falls for an upper-class girl, whose brother, Walsingham, a stockbroker (possibly played by John Cleese), offers to take over the management of Kipps’s money, swindles him and disappears, leaving him a pauper again. Kipps now discovers that money isn’t everything and, in a superb plot twist, returns to his childhood sweetheart, Ann, marries her, and they live happily ever after.

  I learned all this from the script which was sent to me while I made up my mind. I also met with the producer who told me they’d heard that I was a writer, and that if I cared to rewrite any of the dialogue, they would be very interested to see what I might come up with. I was rather excited (and flattered) by this, especially as I thought the ending could be made more interesting if, when Kipps and Ann returned from the wedding at the church, he dismembered her with an axe and invited all his old apprentice friends round for the barbecue.

  So I accepted the role, both for the experience and for the chance to help with the writing, without worrying at all about its minuscule size. I’d discovered that I had about twenty lines altogether, most of them spread over four group scenes in the first act, and the rest delivered in the first scene of the second act, which meant that I could then go to my dressing room and read until I was required for the final bows. I’m amused that the Wikipedia entry for Half a Sixpence says that I played ‘a small but crucial role’. ‘Small’ I wouldn’t argue with; but the ‘crucial’ aspect of my role – the swindling and the absconding – took place in its entirety after I had left the stage and gone off to read, and so I wouldn’t claim much credit for it.

  With my future income now assured, but with several weeks to kill before rehearsals, I found myself working on a new version of Cambridge Circus. The two guys who ran Square East, Murray Sweig and Charles Rubin, both of whom we all liked very much, noticed that audiences were falling off slightly, and asked us if we could put on a new show with different material. Since Graham needed to resume his studies at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and Jo Kendall and Johnny Lynn both wanted to get back to London, this suited us, and those who were left therefore started thinking about new sketches. I decided to try writing on my own, and found it hard to get started because, without Graham there to reassure me, I was uncertain whether what I was putting down was funny. But I stuck with it and began to come up with some material, which I got the others to assess when I went in to do the old show each evening. We also dug up some old skits from Cambridge days and kept a couple of numbers from the Broadway show: the Jones and Palin ‘Humour Lecture’ and the ‘Beatles Hallelujah Chorus’.

  After a while we started rehearsing, and, for the first time since we had opened in London, some of us began to get a bit ratty with each other. Humphrey had done a terrific job moulding the original Circus and then holding it together, but now I wanted more say in the shaping of the new show, as I was coming up with half of the material for it, but, on the other hand, he was still the director, and so the arguments went back and forth. Disagreements about the script were nothing new, and they were to persist through I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and At Last the 1948 Show and Python TV shows to The Meaning of Life. But this was something slightly different. We’d been together for some time, and when that happens everyone starts to develop their own style, and sometimes the styles, which originally blended well, begin to diverge and produce genuine ‘artistic differences’ – a phrase which people use to paper over far more serious conflicts (as when Emperor Hirohito described the attack on Pearl Harbor as being due to ‘artistic differences with Franklin D. Roosevelt’). That said, the squabbling never got too personal and I continued to work with Humph over the next thirty-five years.

  The only other thing that I remember from the rehearsal period was that I started smoking: menthols at first, but within a few months I was on the hard stuff – Larks and Parliament.

  The new show opened in the middle of January 1965, without any kind of fanfare, and got surprisingly good reviews in the New York papers. Jean Hart had come into the cast in place of Jo Kendall, and she sang some jazzy numbers as well as funny ones, and Bill had written several good new songs, so the musical side of the show was exceptionally strong; the buffoonery was largely in the hands of Tim, David and me. I hugely enjoyed performing with these two because we had been doing sketches together long enough to have developed a real comedic rapport. They had great timing, and good energy too, and were very generous, always thinking about the overall effect of a moment, and not just about their own contribution. In one sketch, which we had great fun with, we played three top RAF officers who are briefing bomber crews for a raid over Germany (during the war, of course, though it now occurs to me that it might have been funnier if it had been set in peacetime). The theme was British inefficiency and unpreparedness: at one point the crews are asked to consult their maps and instructed to fly over Gaul and drop their bombs just above the ‘R’ of Holy Roman Empire. Watches are then synchronised with the words ‘In exactly five seconds from . . . now! . . . it will be a few minutes after ten.’

  In another skit, I played a BBC presenter who has carefully prepared his questions for an interview with a deep-sea diver. When he discovers that his interviewee is, in fact, an insurance salesman he has to improvise.

  BBC presenter: You’re not a deep-sea diver?

  Insurance salesman: No.

  Presenter: I see . . . well, if I may ask you some questions about . . . being an ins
urance salesman . . .

  Salesman: Certainly.

  Presenter: When you’ve been . . . selling insurance . . . have you ever been attacked by any large fish . . . like sharks?

  Salesman: . . . Not really, no.

  Presenter: . . . That’s very interesting! And may I ask . . . what is the . . . greatest depth at which you’ve ever worked?

  Salesman: Sub-basement level, I should think.

  Presenter: Really! Sub-basement, eh? Well I never! And finally . . . have you ever experienced ‘the bends’?

  Salesman: The . . . what?

  Presenter: ‘The bends’ . . . it’s something that happens to . . . deep-sea divers sometimes . . . though probably not to insurance salesmen . . .

  Salesman: No . . . I’m afraid not.

  Presenter: I just wondered . . . you know, on the off-chance.

  Salesman: Sorry!

  We also unearthed an old Footlights chestnut, and were delighted when Jean Hart produced a powerful performance as Henry V, exhorting the English troops before the battle of Agincourt.

  In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility:

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger;

  Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;

  Henry’s army, played by Bill, Tim, David and me, were in thrall to their monarch, and would loyally obey his orders, no matter what they were told to do.

  Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

  Let pry through the portage of the head

  Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it

  As fearfully as doth a galled rock

  O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

  Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.

  These instructions were followed to the letter, and produced some acting that would have distressed Lee Strasberg. Especially Tim’s.

  Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,

  Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit

  To his full height.

  As we tottered off stage on tiptoe, I don’t think anyone in the audience would have put money on the English army.

  One other sketch I recall with affection. David played the head keeper of a zoo where most of the animals have gone missing.

  Head keeper: And where are the giraffes?

  Assistant: They were all there on Friday, sir.

  Head keeper: Well, have they been stolen?

  Assistant: Oh no, sir! I think people just borrow them, and forget to give them back.

  After about a month of the new show we found that the audiences were getting smaller again and we all sensed that end of term was approaching.

  By now I had moved out of the Lexington Hotel and was staying with an old Footlights friend called Nick Ullett. He’d been a regular performer in the clubroom Smokers, singing his own songs to a guitar, and when he left Cambridge he went to America, where he teamed up with Tony Hendra to form a successful comedy-musical double act. By now the two of them were making regular appearances on late-night talk shows, including Merv Griffin and, especially, Ed Sullivan. I’d reconnected with Nick through Tony, who’d been to our opening night on Broadway. (Tony, you may remember, had been in the Footlights 1962 revue with Graham, Tim, Humphrey and me; he was still slightly outrageous and formidably well informed, with a thumb in many different writing pies.)

  Nick had a quite roomy apartment at 10 West 65th, right next to Central Park and two minutes from Lincoln Circle. I remember sitting there with him at the end of January, while we listened to Winston Churchill’s funeral on the radio.

  By now I’d been in New York for about six months and I recall writing down the impressions I’d formed of the people. I’ve lost the original, but can still reconstruct the gist.

  1. America had what seemed to me an extraordinary reverence for anyone with lots of money. In England, to appear to be very interested in the old spondulicks was, as I said earlier, considered vulgar and a sign of peasant ancestry. But in America, untrammelled money-grubbing was a way of life – nay, a raison d’être. Furthermore it didn’t matter how the rich made their pile: waste disposal, trailer parks, sex toys, plastic forks, rubber doorstops, pornographic magazines, torture equipment, edible goldfish, mines, contraceptive sheaths, trading in widows and orphans, it . . . just . . . didn’t . . . matter. A journalist friend of mine lost his young wife to a chicken-wire magnate. However your fortune was made, you had paramount status, with just a whiff of moral superiority about it. You’d made it!

  2. Slightly different, though allied to this: success needed to be visible. Visitors to NYC wanted to see the theatrical ‘hits’. If you told them that you’d seen such-and-such a hit, and that it was really dreary and predictable and crass and vacuous, but that there were two productions that nobody knew about that were brilliant and original and exciting . . . regretfully, they still wanted to see the ‘hit’.

  3. New Yorkers weren’t rude so much as tense. If I went into a tobacconist and started with my public school patter, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you but I’d rather care to buy some cigarettes, so if you’d be so good as to allow me to intrude upon your time . . .’, they’d shout ‘Whaddyawant?’ as though you’d insulted them. But if you strode into the store, fixed them with a look of pure hatred and hissed the word ‘Larks!’, they’d smile and chat and tell you why they’d just left their wife.

  Now I turned my thoughts to Half a Sixpence. On the first day of rehearsal, I turned up very early and asked to speak to the musical director. My agent had assured me that the producers all understood about my lack of singing talent, but I wanted to clear the air with the man who mattered. Accordingly, I was led over to meet Stanley Lebowsky. He was short and plump and pleasant, but he was clearly a busy man and had lots to do that day.

  ‘Mr Lebowsky, this is John Cleese. He wants to tell you something.’

  ‘What can I do for you, John?’

  ‘Mr Lebowsky—’

  ‘Stanley . . .’

  ‘Stanley . . . I need to tell you something . . .’

  ‘. . . What?’

  ‘I can’t sing.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I told them at the audition. Really.’

  He put a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

  ‘John, let me tell you something. I’ve been working on Broadway for forty years. Everybody can sing . . .’

  He took me over to a piano, hit a key and asked me to sing the note. I did so, to the best of my ability. I think for a moment he thought I was trying to make him laugh, but then he saw from my face that I was in earnest. He hit the key again very deliberately. I made the same noise. He just stared. I think he quite genuinely could not believe his ears. He hit a different note. I made another noise. He looked a little shaken and then nodded a lot.

  ‘John,’ he said. ‘You’re right. You can’t sing.’

  ‘Sorry, Stanley.’

  ‘Never mind! Just learn the words, and mime . . .’

  Because, of course, I was only in the chorus numbers, surrounded by trained singers, so who would ever know?

  I wandered back to the main room and was astonished to see just how many people had gathered. A Broadway musical requires a small army. Then I was taken over to meet the director, a dear little Texan who looked like a bushbaby, called Word Baker.

  For the first two weeks, rehearsals proceeded at a surprisingly gentle and undemanding pace. After all, I was in scenes solely for the purpose of explaining the plot. I had no big laughs to get, so, as Noël Coward put it, my only requirements were to remember the lines and not fall over the furniture. I therefore became rather relaxed, except when I had to go and rehearse my one and only mime-and-dance routine (which opened the second act). The miming was no problem; the words were simple to learn; all I had to do was to ensure that I made no sound whatsoever. (Stanley Lebowsky co
uld detect a fly clearing its throat, at fifty paces. When, three months after the show opened, I had a rush of blood to the head and actually started singing quietly, pianissimo, at the bottom of my voice, I found him waiting for me as I emerged from my dressing room at the conclusion of the evening’s entertainment. ‘John,’ he said, ‘are you singing?’ To a passing backstage visitor it must have seemed an odd accusation, but he’d caught me at it, fair and square. ‘Only a little bit, Stanley,’ I offered, in extenuation. He looked me right in the eye. ‘Don’t!’)

  So far as the dancing was concerned, my work needed work. This was the only choreography in the show that involved non-professional dancers so I had high hopes that there would be a couple of basket cases to keep me company. No such luck. The other actors had all clearly done this sort of thing before. I felt a flash of panic, imagining that on opening night I would stand out so badly from everyone else on stage that after the first few steps of the routine I would have caught the audience’s exclusive attention, and that they would then spend the rest of the number staring at my efforts, trying to work out what could possibly be wrong with me. So from that moment I dedicated my waking hours to trying to narrow the gap between me and the next-least-talented dancer. The routine was based, unfortunately, on the polka, which involves leaping sideways at unpredictable intervals while moving in circles, and smiling as though this is an enjoyable experience. I gathered it was a Polish form of musical exercise, though what it had to do with dots I never found out. Beads of cold sweat, maybe?

  I rehearsed my steps for hours, with the help of an assistant choreographer, but I could never enact this strange Slavic routine with any kind of confidence. I would sometimes find myself polka-ing away for a few seconds quite fluently, but then the thought ‘My God, I’m doing it!’ would flash into my brain, creating a neurological interference pattern which immediately transformed my prancing into an imitation of a man in battle trying to avoid one of those chariots with nasty sharp knives sticking out of their wheels. The real trained dancers, fine athletes to a man and woman, were extraordinarily kind and patient and encouraging, even though I sometimes caught them watching me with the same fascination people display the first time they see a duck-billed platypus. The only thing I didn’t like about them was that when they themselves danced, they counted out loud the whole time, which I found very distracting. I didn’t know why they were counting, and I was too embarrassed to ask what they were adding up. The number of steps they were dancing, perhaps? ‘I danced 50,112 steps today.’ ‘Hey, that’s great!’ ‘How many did you dance?’ ‘Only 43,694. But I’m going to do another 7,000 after supper.’ A prima ballerina told me that dancers have very little conversation (except about dancing), so perhaps they were just practising not talking about dancing.