So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  By now my relationship with Connie had progressed to the point where we had decided we wanted to live together. I therefore took a small apartment at 213 East 81st, and Connie moved most of her things in. It was a likeable, slightly quirky area, neither smart nor run-down, with strong Czech and Hungarian communities and restaurants. It was here that I discovered just how many good beverages there were around. I’d always been mystified by the paucity and sheer dreadfulness of traditional English drinks: Indian tea, Scotch and bitter all tasted awful to me. But slowly I stumbled upon China tea, and Lowland malt Scotches, and now, Pilsner – especially as brewed by the Germans. What a selection! Light and dark! A new world had opened up.

  I was also tentatively making my way in my new career as a journalist. By way of background work I now read the New York Times dutifully, along with Time and Newsweek, noting with surprise how much space the Times devoted to Asia and the Middle East, compared with what it gave to Europe, but impressed by the thoroughness with which they approached their stories. (I would say ‘seriousness’, but then many British journalists reading this would assume I meant ‘boring’.) My day at Newsweek started with a meeting where Bob Christopher and eight or so writers, including my friend Everett Martin, discussed what was going on in the world and what the magazine should be covering. For me, it was like the perfect seminar, because it was jam-packed with good information about significant world events. At the same time, it was conducted with a relaxed good humour, and my occasional questions were kindly treated. I soon realised that they all had a rather disapproving view of British journalists, who, they felt, were too invested in their writing, and not sufficiently concerned in what they were writing about – ‘long on opinion, short on facts’ just about summed it up. They also once or twice discussed journalistic ethics, which in England is an oxymoron. But what impressed me was that, above all, they were always trying to make clear the distinction between reporting the ‘facts’ and the process of ‘evaluating’ them.

  After a few days, though, during which I penned a couple of lighter-hearted stories which were heavily rewritten, disaster struck my infant journalistic career. I had not been too worried about finding an acceptable way of turning out a few of these minor stories while I was learning my craft, because my mentor Everett was there to guide me. But he was suddenly dispatched to cover a crisis in the Dominican Republic, and I was left to fend for myself. Clearly they didn’t think much of my next efforts because I was soon asked to prepare an obituary for President Sukarno of Indonesia, who had been running his country for twenty years and was looking good for a few more. I took the hint and wrote a letter of resignation to Bob Christopher, to spare him the embarrassment of having to fire me.

  So there I was, that Friday evening, jobless and, indeed, directionless, having dinner with Connie in an open-air restaurant and wondering what on earth I was going to do next. Not that I was worried. Connie was very supportive and I knew I had enough money to eat for a week or two, so the world was my mollusc and I mused about the exciting opportunities ahead. I needn’t have bothered. By Sunday afternoon I was back in show business, and I’ve never looked forward since.

  We’d arranged to have lunch that day with one of my new acquaintances, a young producer I’d met recently, called John Morris. He had a deal, it turned out, with the Establishment Club which Peter Cook had founded in Soho in 1961, the year of Beyond the Fringe and the start of the Satire Boom. By making his club a members-only place, Cook was able to avoid the censorship laws of the time, and put on shows that would have upset the Lord Chamberlain. Morris had acquired the rights to a couple of these for performance in North America, and hearing about me via Newsweek, he asked me if I wanted to join the cast of a show he was about to send off on a mini-tour of Chicago and Washington. The group of four included Peter Bellwood, who had been president of the Footlights in my first year at Cambridge, and who was an immensely likeable and amusing fellow. I knew it would be a pleasure to work with him, so I said ‘Yes’ over the coffee, and agreed to start rehearsing the very next day.

  In a way it was a stroke of purest luck, because having sacked myself on Friday, it meant that I was back earning my crust by Monday morning. But I sometimes wonder what might have turned up if I’d had the nerve to hang around for a time, before snapping up the first offer. Yes, I know about gift horses, but I’d been chatting about banking with two old Cambridge friends who worked at Citibank and had asked me if I might be interested; I could have enquired through Terry Gilliam about writing for Mad magazine; then again I always thought I could work in advertising, and, after all, Madison Avenue was at its sparkiest at that time. But my constant companions, good luck and Westonian cautiousness, decreed otherwise. In fact, I think there have only been about four occasions in my professional life when I have shown any real initiative: suggesting to Graham Chapman that we should contact the other four Pythons-to-be; arranging to write a sitcom with Connie; proposing to Robin Skynner that we should write a TV series about basic principles in psychology; and initiating and shaping A Fish Called Wanda. The rest of the time I have just accepted the next interesting offer, or continued in a pattern already created.

  So we gathered at the producer’s house and read through the Establishment script, which was pretty good if a bit conventional. British satire was only four years old, but there had been a glut of it, and so it had already developed its clichés. Still, as we only had ten days to rehearse we didn’t rewrite much other than cutting some of the more specific British references and replacing a few weaker sketches with ones from other shows we’d been in. It was a mixed bag, but the tone was eighty per cent satirical, with sketches about the Queen, birth control, the Labour Party trying to use subliminal sex messages in their advertising, the Church of England, and so on. What seemed rather standard stuff to us, however, was greeted by the critics and audiences with delight. In those days Americans were not used to political satire: one comedian told me that satire was ‘what closes Saturday night’, so what we were doing seemed very fresh to them. The critics were surprisingly enthusiastic about our performances, too, singling out Peter Bellwood in particular. He had a very engaging, relaxed style, with a wry affability that concealed his precision. Marion Grey, also English – noticeably so – was very well mannered, considerate, almost quiet – until she got on stage, where her work was strong and funny and quite effortless. She did a good Queen (‘Philip, what is an anachronism?’ ‘You’ve been reading again, haven’t you?’). And then there was the shaggy, charming, playful Irishman, with a wonderful purring voice, Joe Maher, who seemed to be acting for a few weeks just for the fun of it, but who somehow went on to pick up three separate Tony nominations for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

  We opened in a small theatre in Hyde Park, just off the University of Chicago campus, in July 1965. The audiences were young and quick and enthusiastic, and the four of us almost immediately found a loose, slightly boisterous style which suited the material. It’s a good feeling when you find a rhythm that chimes in with everybody else’s and the shows become real fun. Luckily we were there for the two weeks in the Fall during which the Chicago weather is pleasant, marking the transition from sticky to freezing; so we strolled everywhere and decided Chicago was a proper ‘great’ city with a proper river and proper big newspaper offices and lots of theatres and lots of friendly Midwesterners making jokes about how dim the Poles were. It had never occurred to me that Polish folk were remarkable in this way, so I was mystified when I was asked for the first time how many Poles it took to change a light bulb. My questioners were equally thrown when I asked them why anyone would use a pole for this purpose.

  I found a pool hall and managed to beat a pool shark. He offered me a return match for $20. I declined: I was wise enough to know that I would never beat him again; I wasn’t wise enough to know that I wouldn’t have won the first game if he hadn’t wanted me to. I was still hilariously naive. So naive, indeed, that I went to the Playboy Club and bought drink
s and felt rather racy. Someone there then told me about a wonderful Peter Cook incident: he’d arrived for dinner at the club and they apologised that his table wasn’t ready yet, so he had a drink and waited quietly. Then some big-shot local politician turned up and blew his top when they asked him to wait, too. ‘Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea who I am?’ Peter got up and took over. ‘Does anyone know who this man is? Can anyone help this poor man? He’s forgotten who he is . . .’ The jerk was so perfectly deflated that the only course left open to him was to leave. On the rare occasions Peter was angry about something, he could be magnificent.

  Thanks to the new show, I had to visit an immigration office in Chicago to extend my work visa, and it was here that I encountered my own local big shot. Unlike Peter, though, I came off worse. It was, of course, meant to be a purely routine matter: I filled the form in carefully and presented it to the immigration officer, a guy in his mid-fifties. The ensuing dialogue went as follows:

  ‘Are you British?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s this then?’

  ‘Oh! That’s my citizenship.’

  ‘You said you were British.’

  ‘. . . I’m sorry?’

  ‘Are you Ukrainian?’

  ‘. . . Ukrainian?’

  ‘It says here “UK”.’

  ‘Oh! No, that’s the United Kingdom.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The United Kingdom. England, Scotland, Wales and—’

  ‘UK is Ukraine.’

  ‘Um. I don’t think so. You know when they have debates in the Security Council, the British ambassador has a little sign in front of him which says “United Kingdom”. UK . . .’

  ‘UK is Ukraine.’

  ‘I promise you, I did international law at Cambridge, and—’

  ‘Are you Ukrainian?’

  ‘. . . No, but—’

  ‘Change it, please. There’s a law against giving incorrect information.’

  Remember that the person I was talking to was a fully trained, experienced officer of the United States Immigration Bureau, a man whose life had been devoted to interactions with foreign nationals, some of whom, over the years, must, statistically speaking, have been citizens of the United Kingdom. And he did not just believe that UK was an abbreviation of ‘Ukraine’; he knew it to be the case with the same degree of certainty he had about the reality of his own existence. Here was a uniformed idiot of the highest possible ranking: a man who even in his own chosen specialised area of expertise had managed to remain pig-ignorant; and not just ignorant (which can easily be remedied) but so incomparably dim-witted that he had not the faintest inkling . . . just how prize-winningly, cat-frighteningly stupid he really was. And so, realising that I must not challenge his authority (as it was the only thing he possessed) I did as I was told and, breaking the law about giving incorrect information, crossed out UK and wrote ‘Great British’. Thus my visa was renewed.

  In a way I was disappointed that our show became such a hit in Hyde Park, because it extended our run by a week, and I found that I was missing Connie a lot. I wanted to get back to New York and make plans about our future. I was therefore relieved when, after our last performance, we finally bundled ourselves into an old van and Peter drove the 800 miles back with hardly a pit stop.

  But I had scarcely settled back into our little apartment to enjoy the autumn when I got the most important phone call of my professional life.

  Chapter 11

  THE CALL WAS from David Frost. Ever since he’d used a little of my material in the 1961 Footlights revue, and then some of my sketches in That Was The Week That Was, he had kept in touch with me. He’d seen Cambridge Circus in the West End, and again during our brief time on Broadway, and when he was in New York doing the American version of That Was The Week That Was, he’d occasionally call, just to ‘stay in touch’. Of course, I always left these contacts to him, because he was hugely famous and insanely busy on British and American television. So, as usual, he greeted me with great cheeriness and warmth, and after the usual thirty seconds of banter he said he was doing thirteen half-hour sketch shows for the BBC in the New Year, and would I like to be part of it? This extraordinary offer was presented so casually that it felt almost like the natural next development in our relationship. Before the immensity of it had sunk in, I told him I’d love to, and he whinnied, ‘Oh! They’ve just called my flight! Got to go! Call me when you get to London! Bye-ee!’, and he was gone. And the next phase of my life had been settled, just like that.

  I’d always assumed I would return to London, eventually, but events were moving faster than I had anticipated. I told Connie about Frost’s call and we started making plans about our future together. We’d been talking for a while about getting married. Now, I realised, getting hitched sooner rather than later had a practical aspect to it: Connie’s career was very important to her, and I wanted to be sure that if she followed me to England she would readily be able to get a work-permit.

  In the middle of all this rather exciting planning I had to leave for Washington, and the second leg of the Establishment ‘tour’. This time we were appearing not in a theatre but at a nightclub. As the facilities were rather limited – a slightly raised stage at one end of the room – and as we were expected to do two performances a night and three on Saturday, we cut the show down to forty minutes and happily relaxed into the nightclub atmosphere. The sober members of the audience were very appreciative, but I found myself facing a new challenge on stage: how to get through sketches with a fellow performer who started the evening one sheet to the wind, and regularly added a fresh sheet; with the result that by the third show on Saturday night he was several more of them to the wind than the customary three, and increasing their number at a rate of knots, causing our scenes to tack in unexpected directions.

  For example, we had a ‘quickie’ which went like this.

  Lights up. I am standing in the middle of the stage. Enter Joe Maher, with a policeman’s helmet on. He marches up to me and announces:

  ‘Irish stew!’

  ‘Irish stew? What about Irish stew?’

  ‘Irish stew in the name of the law!’

  Joe then frogmarches me off the stage.

  It was so quick and silly we got away with it. But on the Saturday night (the third performance) it went like this.

  Lights up. I am standing in the middle of the stage. Enter Joe, wearing a policeman’s helmet at a strange angle. He marches up to me and announces:

  ‘I arrest you!’

  Hard to know where to go from there, really. ‘OK’ or ‘It’s a fair cop’ doesn’t open up a vista of comedic possibilities. If I tried, ‘What’s the charge?’ he could have said, ‘No charge. I do it for free!’ but, looking into his eyes, I didn’t think he’d get my drift, so I just burst into tears, which at least made him laugh. A few minutes and another sheet later, Joe had to start a sketch with a rather long speech. He embarked on it with quiet determination, getting a fair number of the words correct, if not exactly in the right order; but as he reached the midpoint of the monologue, he began slowing, like a huge lorry approaching the brow of the hill, and such words as he did manage to emit bore very little relation to each other, although he had increased their loudness considerably, as though to compensate for their scarcity. I tried to interrupt, to help him out, but he would not yield. He was going to finish this damn speech or die in the attempt. On and on he went, as members of the audience tried to get their checks, or at least another drink. And at that point I did something naughty. I asked him to wait a moment, walked off stage, picked up a chair, brought it back on stage with me, sat down on it, and then thanked him and asked him to continue. He looked at me, his face slowly crumbled, and he started crying with laughter, sending out great sobs of mirth as he took the chair from me and sat down on it himself, spreading himself over the back of the chair, shaking and shaking with the wonderful helpless convulsions of a man who has come to the conclusion that nothi
ng, absolutely nothing . . . matters. And by this time the rest of the room had joined in this glorious, pointless merriment. They knew not why, neither did they care. It is said that laughter is infectious. Well, several people nearly died.

  He was something special, that Joe Maher.

  One other thing from my time in Washington sticks in my mind. After the show one night we were carousing in a bar when a fellow drinker offered to read our palms. He stared at mine for some time and then said, ‘This is very unusual. Your logical, thinking side balances your creative side. Almost everyone has one side stronger than the other.’ This caught my curiosity, and over the years I came to the conclusion he was right, because the people who were more creative than me didn’t seem very strong at analysis or construction, especially when it came to plot and to the careful building of emotion within a scene; whereas the ones who analysed well were good at verbal wit and parody, but seemed very constrained creatively, unable to make the non-logical jumps (or even hops) over to where the richest comedy lay. Perhaps this explains why some witty people aren’t very funny, and why some very funny people can’t think straight. I’m not top class in either department but I can switch back and fro between them, so I can sometimes get to something good if I rewrite enough (A Fish Called Wanda took thirteen drafts).

  And so our harmonious little Establishment interlude came to an end and we went our separate ways. Many years afterwards, Joe contacted me when he was visiting London. I threw a party for him, and we vowed to stay in touch, but the next thing I heard was that he had died of a brain tumour. He had teased me mercilessly in London for not realising he was gay; I pointed out I had not missed that he was Irish, because he’d been so refreshingly open about that.