by John Cleese
Apart from my informal socialisation classes, I had one other learning experience in Boston. One Sunday morning I woke up with a very painful toothache. It was so bad I couldn’t cope, and eventually I found a dentist who was prepared to provide emergency treatment over the weekend. As I sank gratefully into his chair I envisaged an end to my suffering. He advised an X-ray, took several, and disappeared to process them. After a time (during which the pain had not diminished) he reappeared, and put the various X-rays up on an illuminated screen, and then invited me to come and view the screen with him, which allowed him to point to the number of procedures that I was going to need – some crowns, a couple of bridges, a root canal or two, and so forth. When he was finished he offered me his hand and asked me to call his secretary to make a schedule of appointments so that he could carry out this intensive programme before I left Boston.
I was astounded. The fact that the sound of cash registers had completely obliterated from his mind the reason for my visiting him in the first place appalled me. When I reminded him, instead of profuse apologies, he quite casually commented, ‘Oh yes’, and glanced rather pointedly at his watch – it was a Sunday after all – before injecting me and starting on the drilling. I began to suspect that the American professional classes had a different interpretation of the word ‘vocation’ from the one I was used to. And this was before I’d met any of their lawyers.
The move to Toronto brought a surprise or two. Although the opening night’s performance was well received by the audience, the next morning’s reviews were savage. I was shocked that our show, which had been well liked by the Boston public and critics alike, was now dismissed as a dreadful, talent-free disaster. Yet on my arrival at the theatre for the matinee I noticed that everyone was carefree and blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that was going to be our Broadway first night. When I finally plucked up the courage to mention the reviews to one of the producers, he laughed and told me, ‘Oh, the Canadian critics are always like that. You see, nobody pays any attention to them. So they write vicious stuff to try and get noticed.’ I wondered if this was just bravado, but, sure enough, three weeks later Half a Sixpence opened in New York to really rather good reviews from the so-called ‘Butchers of Broadway’. Meanwhile the cast contented themselves with the thought that it was reassuring to know that there were, after all, some mean people in Canada.
I was still a little shaken by the thought that a critic of a proper newspaper would be allowed to use such a base and unethical way to advertise himself, but then I realised that from a journalist’s point of view the great advantage of writing abusively is that it takes no talent; the sad thing about it is that the English sometimes mistake such taunting for wit.
I found Toronto an immensely likeable city, spacious and gentle and slightly dignified, but in a low-key, friendly way. The only people who didn’t seem to think much of it were its inhabitants, who could hardly wait for you to ask directions, because that gave them the perfect opportunity to apologise for it. What they were apologising for I never understood. I think they felt uninteresting, compared with America. I took the opposite view; I remember reading about the doctrine of American ‘Exceptionalism’ and thinking that what I liked so much about Canadians was that they consider themselves unexceptional. This modest, unthreatening attitude seems to produce a nation that is stable, safe, decent and well respected. It’s just a shame that for seven months of the year it’s so cold that only Canadians would put up with it.
Still, they have one compensation for their climate. Hockey (or as we would call it, ice hockey). My God, they love it!
During one of the first performances of Half a Sixpence in Toronto, I was on stage when I heard the sound of muffled cheering coming from the wings. I could not believe it was connected with the scene we were playing, so the moment I got off stage, I hurried to its source and found a large group of stagehands glued to a TV set. They were watching the semi-finals of the Stanley Cup, where their beloved Maple Leafs were taking on their arch rivals, the dastardly Montreal Canadiens. It was gripping stuff, and by the end of the show the entire cast had got involved, rushing over to the TV the moment they completed a dance number to cheer for the Leafs and then racing back to the stage for the next spurt of hoofing. (With the exception of Ann Shoemaker, who appeared quite unmoved. Rumour had it she was a Black Hawks fan.)
The semi-finals consisted of seven games, so by the time the decider was reached, the cast’s devotion to the Leafs had reached fever pitch and people were missing their entrances, and leaving scenes earlier than usual, lest they missed a crucial goal. And when the odious Canadiens (who couldn’t even spell their own name correctly) scored the winner in the very last minute of the seventh game, the show-stopper that immediately followed had a despairingly bereft and forlorn quality that was quite contrary to the director’s intentions. Luckily, Gene was back in New York by then. And the next day, we were also heading there, to our loved ones and to our Broadway opening.
Fortunately, my first-night nerves did not seem as bad as usual, probably because we’d done plenty of performances and were confident we had a pretty good show, and also because, unless I fell over, nobody was going to notice me. But just before I made my first entrance I went to stand in the wings and saw, sitting in the box closest to the stage and about fifteen feet above it, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie. It was not just their presence that unnerved me; it was their demeanour: they were leaning over the edge of the box with an expression of gleeful, bloodthirsty anticipation, like a couple of vultures excitedly waiting for their supper to expire. I noted, for future reference, how the possibility of my public humiliation gave them great joy, and the promise of a better life, and this suddenly ignited in me a fierce determination: a steely, warrior-like resolution not to fall over.
And though I say it, who shouldn’t, my performance was a triumph! Not only did I not come a cropper, I circumnavigated the Polish lateral-springing-about with fewer than usual mistakes, my miming was lip-perfect and my dialogue scenes were so inconspicuous that I avoided any mention at all in the reviews. I spent the next month imagining Brooke-Taylor and Oddie slinking away from the theatre with their tails between their scrawny legs. Friends! I never encountered such treachery again.
Until the Pythons, of course . . .
Half a Sixpence became a decent-sized hit, and I found I had a lot of time on my hands. As usual, I did nothing to advance my showbiz career, but I did find other ways to occupy myself. One, strangely enough, was journalism. While Cambridge Circus was still on Broadway, I was waiting on a subway platform when I was recognised by one of the very few people in New York who’d ever seen the show: a Newsweek journalist called Everett Martin. We chatted, I told him how interested I was by international politics and, on the spot, he invited me to my first Thanksgiving dinner. I had no idea what an important occasion it was for Americans: especially for Everett, who met his next wife that evening. After that we lunched a few times. I loved the way he was so well informed; in fact, I told him how useful and honourable the job of a journalist seemed to me: to try to understand a situation, and then describe it interestingly. Just before I left for Boston, he asked me to contact him on my return, because the foreign editor at Newsweek, Bob Christopher, wanted to see if I might care to join the staff for a trial period, contributing light-hearted, more humorous pieces, at least to begin with. So now I had another iron in the fire, over and above my song-and-dance career. I studied Newsweek carefully and discovered that I preferred its style to that of Time. I also noted that the foreign-affairs articles usually started with a remark made to the journalist by a cab driver, followed by a second paragraph that began: ‘However, by the end of last week it was becoming abundantly clear that . . .’ How difficult could it be? I thought. I therefore spent a lot of time reading about world politics. There was something about seeing the world and understanding how it worked that excited me.
For the first time in my life, I also made regular visit
s to art galleries. I was staggered by the abundance of great paintings that I could see at the Met, MOMA, the Frith, the Guggenheim, and all the commercial galleries scattered all over Manhattan. I dutifully stared at them for longer than most people; it seemed to me that I had a rather slow eye that simply didn’t take in visual information quickly; that I had a poor memory for it. I also discovered that I couldn’t abide paintings with plump angels with spindly trumpets serenading even plumper ladies with wispy underwear, and that most of the more schematic modern art left me unaffected and puzzled, in a dissatisfying way. But now and again I would find something I could hardly tear myself away from that made me tingle and even shiver with delight: probably a Bosch, or a Brueghel, or a Caravaggio, or a Vermeer, or a Rembrandt, or a Courbet, or a Manet, or an Impressionist, or a Cézanne, or a Fauvist. Best of all, I noticed that whenever I walked home from an exhibition I felt calmer and saner than when I’d gone in.
Talking of great artists brings me to the subject of Terry Gilliam, because he liked them too. He had approached me after he’d seen me in a performance of Cambridge Circus. At the time he was working for Help! magazine, founded by the (apparently) legendary Harvey Kurtzman, who had made Mad magazine (apparently) famous. Terry asked me if I would work with him on a story for Help!, told in the form of ‘fumetti’; this meant that in place of drawings there would be photographs, but ones with speech balloons coming out of the characters’ mouths. Terry explained that what he’d liked about my acting was the ‘faces that you pulled’. This was rather flattering, because what I had long admired about Sir Laurence Olivier and, on film, Marlon Brando, was that they pulled the best faces that I had ever seen – much better than the faces pulled by, for example, Ingrid Bergman or Cary Grant, or Dame Sybil Thorndike, who couldn’t, frankly, pull faces to save her life. Terry, being so visually gifted, was terribly good with faces; it was only what was going on behind them that mystified him.
Trying not to let Terry’s praise go to my head, I agreed and we embarked on a two-day photo shoot in which I played a young husband who discovers one day that a Barbie doll that his young daughter has been given is surprisingly realistic; he is strangely attracted to it (her); he becomes obsessed, until one night etc., etc. It was a pleasant, stress-free shoot and Terry seemed happy with most of the faces I pulled. When I saw the results I thought he had told the story well, but I found it slightly distasteful: perhaps my Westonian prudery was asserting itself, but then I have never shared Terry’s deep conviction that the main purpose of Art is to rub people up the wrong way; or perhaps I was just worried that having it away with a very small figurine might suggest that I was rather sparingly endowed. Anyway, Terry and I met up occasionally, although neither of us would have bet heavily on the prospect of another professional co-operation. It’s odd to think he was the second Python with whom I worked.
Meanwhile, Connie and I picked up where we had left off. Quite unlike me, she kept busy with acting and singing lessons, and a regular flow of auditions. She was looking for roles in ‘summer stock’ productions, and to our excitement, she landed a great one in a comedy called Never Too Late, which was set to tour parts of the East Coast that summer. The lead was played by the comedy star Bert Lahr, who was best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Connie had a decent-sized role, and she played most of her scenes with Bert; when I took a train down to Pennsylvania to catch a matinee performance, I was proud to see her standing toe to toe with Bert’s considerable presence. It’s odd again to think that ten years later I would be writing a successful sitcom with her, and that thirty-five years later she would be marrying Bert’s son John.
I could only attend her matinees as I was still required briefly each night at the Broadhurst Theatre, where, apart from the occasional moment on stage, I was managing to get a lot of reading done; it was such a gentle routine that $200 per week seemed more than my due. One performance morphed into another and the months passed without leaving any trace on my memory.
An advertisement for VAT 69.
Except when things went awry. All funny theatrical stories are about disasters, and when a large number of singers and dancers are involved, the sight of them all trying to keep a straight face becomes risible in itself, especially when they deliberately start dancing off stage, where they can collapse into laughter for a moment, before taking a deep breath and capering back in front of the audience again.
One evening a very competent dancer called Bill, having just completed three spectacular leaps with legs at full extension forward and back, was walking round to start the next part of his performance, when he inexplicably fell in a heap. It was so sudden, and unexpected, and delightfully simple, that it was gloriously funny; and even more so when Bill then got back on his feet and tried to laugh the whole thing off. This, for some reason, turned out to be a terrible misjudgement. If he had gone straight on dancing, the audience might have been able to overlook the lapse, but in trying to share the joke about his pratfall, he reduced them to depths of embarrassment I had rarely before witnessed. They writhed, they hid their faces and they started to read their programmes. Meanwhile poor Bill, realising that he had actually made things worse, just stood there contemplating hara-kiri while the rest of us danced around him, trying to keep straight faces, and failing badly.
The paradox, of course, was that we were the ones who should have been embarrassed. There’s a similar phenomenon when comedy is going badly. There you are, going for it, and failing, and the sound of a very little, rather forced laughter coming from an audience that is trying to encourage you truly makes you want to end it all; but when you are knocking yourself out, and the response is total, dead silence . . . it can suddenly tickle you insanely pink. Maybe it’s because you have in fact died, so it doesn’t matter any more.
The most surprising thing that you begin to learn from audiences is just how much you can get away with. All sorts of mistakes and accidents and horrendous confusions will be happily accepted by the paying public: they will assume they missed something, or that they were being a bit thick, or that the accident was always intended to happen. You apologise that they had to come to see you the night that someone in the stalls had a fit, and they say, ‘Oh, we thought that was part of the show.’ I sometimes wonder why we bother.
Just such a moment occurred during the run of Half a Sixpence. There’s a scene in the show when Tommy Steele’s childhood sweetheart, played by Polly James, realises that she has lost his love to Carrie Nye, and, in horror, drops the tea tray she is carrying. Well, obviously she can’t drop a proper one, because there might be broken crockery where the dancers have to prance around thirty seconds later, and there won’t be enough time to clear it away. Initially, therefore, the crockery is attached to the tray with wires; but some of it still breaks, so plastic tea things are substituted. Now the problem is that the falling plastic makes the wrong sound: instead of a loud crash, there’s a tiny rattle; so now a stagehand has to stand in the wings with a large metal tray with metal plates on it, and he has, on a cue from Polly, to drop the tray at the same time that Polly drops all the plastic in order to make it sound as though the resulting crash comes from the on-stage tray. (Yes, I know you’re ahead of me.) One matinee, the stagehand misses the cue when Polly drops her tray, and it therefore lands silently. There’s a moment of panic as everyone on stage freezes. Meanwhile the stagehand faces the most difficult decision of his entire life. After some thought, he decides ‘Better late than never’ and drops his tray, making the normal startling clatter. We peep out at the audience surreptitiously: they are staring contentedly ahead and continuing to enjoy their afternoon. There is not the tiniest ripple of surprise, nor a nanosecond of mystification: everyone knows that sound travels slower than light, and if it was rather slower than usual today, well, this is a matinee. On stage we can’t believe their calm acceptance of the miracle. And then . . . from the back of the stalls, from my old friend Tony Hendra, who has chosen to see the show this ve
ry afternoon, peals of laughter that continue for several minutes, puzzling the audience no end.
By the time I prepared to leave the show I was bored to death with my role, but while I was relieved at the prospect of being shot of it I still felt a pang of sadness. I was genuinely fond of the cast. I thought Tommy Steele was splendid: his talent, his charm and charisma, his professionalism, his cheerful friendliness were all terrific. Even the great Shoemaker had unbent a little over time; and the rest of the cast gave their best every night and were easy to be around.
One of the odder things about show business is that you grow quite close to people during a production, and then may literally never see them again. Despite all my affectionate memories of the show, I can only recall three occasions on which I have bumped into my old Sixpence friends since 1965: I encountered Polly James at a London party in the late 70s; I made the mistake once of playing a charity squash match against Tommy; and in 2009, to my surprise and delight, Gene Saks recognised me in a New York restaurant. I was touched, since forty-four years had passed, during which he’d directed countless Broadway hits and had enjoyed a twenty-year collaboration with the great Neil Simon, on both stage and screen, including some of the classiest film comedies of that period, such as The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Barefoot in the Park. He’s ninety-two as I write this in 2014, and still working. Perhaps he’s got a part for me . . .
Although Half a Sixpence was a wonderful experience from a personal point of view, it was a surprisingly useless one professionally. I don’t think I learned a single thing that was subsequently helpful to me. Even though Gene’s tutorial on energy was interesting, it never really applied to my TV or film work. And musicals don’t appeal to me, by and large, since I look for funniness, wit, intriguing plots and a degree of subtlety that are strangers to most productions. Worse still for me, most musical comedies aren’t really comedies. I think, therefore, that I had a tendency to underrate Half a Sixpence: in reality it had a lot of good tunes, some tremendous upbeat show-stoppers, a few touching moments, an enthusiastic, talented cast and a real star. Let’s not forget it got eight Tony nominations, too, including Best Musical. So if I’ve sounded a bit snotty, I apologise.