by John Cleese
I also meditated on whether I required a change of personality – or perhaps just a change of name would do. I’d always thought ‘John’, though very popular in England since King John’s reign (and despite it, too), was rather dull and tame: worthy and honest, but not at all sparky. Of course, in the old days Johns were often called Jack, which is a much better handle: a bit cheeky, cheerful and, let’s face it, sexy. Whoever heard of a ‘Dear Jack’ letter? A Jack would tear the damn thing up. In addition, I’d always preferred ‘Cheese’ to ‘Cleese’, which is, quite simply, not a proper name. So, I thought, if had been Jack Cheese, I could have gone to live in Monterey and started a bank, and written in the evenings and had children with Constance Cheese, who would never have been able to resist Jack’s advances.
Because my relationship with Connie had been so on and off (and was now off), I had become ever closer to Pippa, whom, as you will recall, I had first met in Ibiza. She was kind, cheerful, fun, and just plain easy to be around. Ultimately, though, I came to the rather hackneyed conclusion that, although I was incredibly fond of her, I wasn’t actually in love with her. I would have liked to have been, but I wasn’t, and that seemed crucial. What’s more, I realised that I was not able to extinguish my feelings for Connie, despite the ‘Dear John’ letter, and that I was still, probably, on average, taking things overall, at a conservative estimate, in love with her. Even though she wasn’t, almost certainly, in love with me. However, one thing I knew for sure was that I felt unsettled in a quiet but all-important way.
So I phoned Connie and gave her some cock-and-bull story about having to come to New York for work reasons, and said it would be nice to see her while I was there. When she didn’t tell me to drop dead, I jumped on a plane, and, once at my hotel, called her. She told me that she had arranged a small party for me the following evening – just friends of hers whom I knew from my time in New York – and at that my heart sank: I realised that by having friends there she was making sure that emotions would be kept under control, and so was clearly indicating how she viewed my visit. I thanked her and rang off. Oh well . . .
The next day I went to the party, and set eyes on Connie for the first time in several months. She was very friendly, we chatted, and I came to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing between us any more, absolutely nothing. Nevertheless I acted all cheerful and optimistic, and after a couple of hours was able to make excuses about jet lag and slink back to my hotel, as bereft as an artichoke. Except that halfway there I suddenly thought, ‘What is the point of this silly pretence that I’m here for work, when I want to fly back home first thing tomorrow?’ So I turned round, trudged back to Connie’s apartment, rang the bell, confessed my pathetic plan, apologised, and found ten minutes later that we were getting married.
I have no idea what happened during those ten minutes, but happen it did, and the two of us then went out for a celebratory dinner. Later that night, back in her apartment, we talked about practicalities and, for the very first time, about money. Connie explained that she was fairly comfortably off, while I had to reveal that I wasn’t – that whereas in America there was much money to be made in television, working for the BBC was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and that for The Frost Report I had received a grand total for the series of about £1,400, on which I then paid eighty-three per cent income tax. I think I’d mentioned this before our engagement but Connie must have thought I was joking. (Only two years later, when I told an old Footlights friend who worked a lot in American television what I was paid per episode of Monty Python, he laughed so much that he fell off the sofa.)
Fortunately it did not take long to reassure her that there was plenty of work for me in London and that we would have a reasonable standard of living there. We decided to marry in New York, though, and we agreed it would be a very small and simple affair; we both liked the idea of a proper ceremony, and so we chose a Unitarian church where all sorts of religions were embraced, and where I would be allowed to go through the service, carefully removing all the references to God. The Church of England had certainly worked its magic on me.
Connie had a lot of arrangements to make, so I flew back to London to look for a flat, and to face the awful bit. There are few feelings worse than the mixture of dread and guilt that grips you when you are about to dump someone who doesn’t deserve it. It’s much easier when things between you have been difficult for some time; it’s much, much easier when it’s unpremeditated and the natural denouement of a really appalling row, with accusations and recriminations and long-standing resentments (and a few freshly minted ones) and high-octane screaming and savage insults, because then the dumping process brings immediate relief and a delightful sense of easy, glowing self-justification – at least, until seventy-two hours later, when separation anxiety begins to kick in. But to dump someone, albeit ceremoniously, when she has been nothing but kind and cheerful and thoughtful and affectionate, just because she fails to tweak some obscure part of your unconscious . . . well, it makes you wish you were a sociopath or, better still, a banker.
To make things worse, Pippa took it very well. But she wanted to leave London for a time, decided on Johannesburg, and off she went. Two years later we bumped into each other again and we have been great friends ever since. It’s typical of Pippa that she has also got on so well with most of my wives.
* * *
fn1 The title was intended as a joke about the slowness of programme planners making a decision.
fn2 On The 1948 Show we had a great editor called Johnny Fielding, who had once worked on The Goon Show. When the powers that be persisted in refusing to roll his name at the end of The 1948 Show, we gave him a credit nevertheless, but for ‘Choreographing the underwater chariot race’. This went through unchallenged. Each TV edit Johnny did for us took about eight minutes, as the audio and video tracks had to be parted, and then cut separately, before being blended again. Interestingly, this was precisely the same system as the one employed by the Romans.
fn3 And it can be – it’s on the DVD of salvaged footage.
fn4 There’s a good performance of it on iTunes, when Rowan Atkinson and I reprised it for an Amnesty concert.
Chapter 14
ON 20 FEBRUARY 1968 Connie and I were joined together at the Unitarian church in Manhattan, at a warm, friendly little service, with about fifteen friends present. The only moment of disappointment came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I’d failed to excise one particular mention of the word ‘God’. I can still remember how Connie looked just as the minister gave us his permission to kiss. Everything felt very right.
We decided to travel to London by boat, and it was the tranquillity of life on board the Queen Elizabeth that made me realise just how frantic my life had become over the past couple of years. I had experienced being lived by my life, as they say, rather than living it. It was a busyness that made me feel out of control. I had never thought of myself as particularly driven, yet I was now working on something every day, and the little spare time that remained was then immediately filled by a mass of petty obligations that I resented but seemed powerless to control. When I’d first been in New York, at Square East and then in Half a Sixpence, I’d spent most of my time reading, going to art galleries, taking exercise, seeing films, exploring the city, eating with friends. I always had great chunks of time for myself. Now, in London, I had to plan a week ahead if I wanted to get my hair cut. I had to adapt Edmund Burke: the price of free time was eternal vigilance. I felt that if I turned my back, someone would write an appointment in my diary.
I could see (though not as clearly as I do now) that one of my biggest problems was me. Because I wanted everyone to like me and to approve of me, I tried to be nice to everyone all the time and this proved a remarkably efficient way of losing control over my life. Connie noticed this very quickly. After we’d been in London a few months, she gave me some good advice. She said, ‘Don’t feel like you have to greet every waiter as though he is a
long-lost friend, and when we go for dinner at someone’s house, don’t take over the role of the host.’ What’s more, being very nice was pretty tiring, so I often became tetchy – in as nice a way as possible of course – which meant I had to be twice as nice the next day, to prove how nice I really was. Consequently, I hardly ever dared to say a polite but firm ‘No’ to anyone. And this brought me a second problem, because when the only people who are going to ask you for time-consuming favours, or invite you to boring events, are your friends and relations, it’s possible to control things; but when you become even a minor celebrity you are faced with a constant deluge of requests for autographs, photographs, personal effects that can be auctioned, mementoes, locks of hair, speeches, advice on how to get into show business, money for charities, money to help people through university, money for operations, money for people who are down on their luck, quick chats over coffee about comedy, messages to children to encourage them before their exams, requests from student magazines for interviews, and for lists of my top ten books, films, songs, comedians, holiday resorts, wines, footballers, ways to be happy, most embarrassing moments, cocktails, walks in the Lake District, national flags, cheeses, cars and operations; also for help with finding an agent, for meetings with seven-year-olds who are my biggest fans, jokes for best-man speeches, recommendations of speech therapists in the Weston-super-Mare area, introductions to Ronnie Corbett, confirmation that I used to know a particular person, that it really was me in Beccles Town Hall snooker room on 23 February 1959, and for explanations of why a sketch in The 1948 Show had used the phrase ‘one up the jacksy’, why my parents had chosen to send me to Eton, why I was such an ardent Quaker, how it was that I had stopped collecting death masks, why I had climbed K2 so frequently, and why I had finally agreed to play Othello.
By now I had a six-hours-a-week secretary, and when we had conscientiously worked through these requests and questions, we had to turn to deal with the invitations I had received: to speak at school sports days, at university unions, at Rotary luncheons, at retired railwaymen clubs, at drama colleges, at police dinners and political meetings; and to judge essay competitions, Weston-super-Mare beauty pageants, fancy-dress outfits, student plays, tug-of-war contests and carved-vegetable competitions; and to attend weddings, anniversaries, prize-givings, birthday parties, centenaries, summer fêtes, Labour Party rallies, Conservative Party rallies, Liberal Party rallies, Plaid Cymru rallies, car rallies, art gallery openings, amateur-theatrical first nights, Barrow-in-Furness Methodist Pigeon Fanciers’ Wine and Cheese family evenings, short film festivals, medium-length film festivals, crematorium openings, children’s parties, brass band galas, water-sports conventions, local history exhibitions, coronations, and my personal all-time favourite, an invitation to go to Melton Mowbray to attend the christening of somebody’s cat.
And I want to emphasise that every single request or invitation came from really nice, polite, friendly people. (Mind you, I’ve only ever seen one rude invitation: it was from the Dundee Students’ Union to Her Majesty the Queen, informing her that they had decided to invite her to visit Dundee University by thirteen votes to nine.) So I agonised over every single response, never saying, ‘Sorry, I’m too busy’, because it might seem rather rude, but instead explaining how busy I was at present, but that perhaps in a few months I might, etc., etc. . . . thus merely postponing the decision and piling up half-promises to the point where simply doing away with myself seemed the easiest solution.
A lot of these requests came from charities. Now, I never met a charity I didn’t like. (I used to look askance at the Association for the Aid of Distressed Gentlefolk, but was eventually persuaded of its vital importance.) The problem was that there were over 60,000 active ones in the UK. So, seriously, how do you say ‘Yes’ to cancer, and ‘No’ to spina bifida? Every day, opening my post presented me with a series of Sophie’s choices. And all this agonising – this ridiculous time-wasting – was because it took me another thirty years to learn that if you say ‘No’ in a friendly, chatty way, people accept it with great grace and goodwill, and do not hate you, or send death squads after you, or report you to the Daily Mail. And until I realised this, I found myself resenting perfectly amiable requests – simply because I was incapable of a guilt-free ‘No’. Nowadays I have a simple rule: you can ask me anything you like, provided I can say ‘No’. I have also learned from nightclub bouncers that there are just as effective ways of refusing people’s demands that are less personally confrontational. When a bouncer is told, ‘I am a close personal friend of Mick Jagger, and he invited me to his birthday party this evening, but I have mislaid my invitation, and I have a couple of tickets for the Wimbledon final that his wife gave me just now to give to him personally, will you let me in?’ he will reply, ‘I’m afraid that isn’t going to happen, sir.’ This impersonal style presents the ‘No’ as though it is a law of physics: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but unfortunately entropy – that is, microscopic disorder of a body – cannot ever decrease, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Sorry!’ So I use a variant of this ploy when people suddenly appear at my elbow, asking for a photograph with me. I’m really not sure why this ‘Sorry to interrupt you but can I have a picture with you?’ irritates me so much. Perhaps it’s the idea of providing photographic proof for the rest of eternity of the moment I stood next to someone I’d never set eyes on before. In the past, I have to confess, I sometimes responded to the request by saying, ‘What, to commemorate the fact that we met four seconds ago?’ But now I have taken to replying, ‘I’m sorry but I’m afraid I don’t do that’, delivering the line with a fatalistic smile that hints that the interloper is asking me to betray some deeply held religious principle, and that the matter is consequently out of my hands. This has failed only once, at a South African airport in 2013, when it infuriated a fellow passenger so much that he wrote to the Cape Argus about it.
In the old days people would ask for a photograph of you, but now it’s always, always . . . with you. Presumably so they can show their friends, ‘Look there’s me with . . . what’s-his-name.’ I truly believe that the worst aspect of the whole celebrity merry-go-round is the belief that your life becomes more meaningful because you have touched the hem of Simon Cowell’s garment, or that true wisdom involves knowing the name of Steven Seagal’s nanny’s dog.
I feel a lot better for that.
So, anyway . . . Where was I? Oh yes . . .
On the Queen Elizabeth with Connie, thinking about why my life had become too busy. So far as work was concerned, I knew I was not driven by some great ambition. My horizons were, in fact, surprisingly constrained. I wanted to gain increasing artistic control over the television programmes I did, but I did not yearn for The John Cleese Show; I much preferred to be an influential member of a small team so that I had a lot of control over the material and how it was presented, but not total responsibility. And I wanted the shows to be as funny as we could make them because I had, by then, realised that it was much easier in comedy to be clever than it was to be funny. And, as my experience of performing in Half a Sixpence had shown me, I had no ambition to act in the theatre (between Half a Sixpence and The Alimony Tour – forty-six years – I only performed on stage in the Amnesty and Monty Python shows). So far as films were concerned, they weren’t on my radar screen at all. They existed in a separate universe from mine, and never the twain would meet. So I was myopically focused on British television, of which I was inordinately proud, since it was clearly the best in the world (or, as somebody said, ‘the least bad in the world’).
Anyway, after five days of an enticingly tranquil voyage, Connie and I landed at Southampton, made our way to London and moved into a flat I’d found for us in Knightsbridge. It was on the fifth floor of an attractive 20s apartment block, between the Knightsbridge Fire Station and Harrods, on Basil Street. Yes, Basil Street. When people hear this, they quite naturally say, ‘Oh, that’s why you called him Basil.’ I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. By th
e time we started writing Fawlty Towers, we were long gone from Knightsbridge, and I know we never made the connection consciously. Believe me, it is quite possible that these things are coincidental. For example, everyone who worked for Sir Charles Forte assumed that Fawlty was a reference to Trust House Forte hotels and restaurants. Had that occurred to you? It didn’t to me. And take Basil’s initials: ‘BF’ for my father’s generation was one of the rudest things well-mannered people could say about a man – it meant ‘bloody fool’. Again, it never crossed my mind. A final example: it only dawned on me when I started to write this book that two of my most successful appearances have been in shows with circus in the title. Now if you say, ‘Oh, come on, you must have been influenced unconsciously by Basil Street – admit it’, I will reply, ‘Well, if I was influenced unconsciously, then by definition I wouldn’t know about it, would I? But I don’t think so, and it’s my life we’re talking about, not yours, and if it were yours, I would defer to you, because you know a lot more about it than I do. And perhaps I’m writing this book because “book” begins with a “b” and so does Basil, which was a success, so unconsciously I’m hoping a book will bring me success, whereas screenplay begins with an “s”, like Sybil, and Basil’s relationship with her was a disaster, and that pushed me towards television.’ And you will say, ‘No, that’s not a fair example.’ And I will say, ‘Yes, it is! Now will you stop interrupting me and let me get on with writing the fucking thing?’