A poor night’s sleep. I have a nagging sore throat, aches all over and the appalling continuous hum of the air-conditioning outside my window. I feel just … just bad. But this is a promotional tour and physical weakness has no sympathetic hearing.
Today is dominated by a party, to be held at Sardi’s restaurant, to launch us as new stars on Clive Davis’ Arista label. Nancy has kept phoning, anxiously mentioning the party – there is talk of us changing (into what? We have one suit between us). Anyway, there is generally evident a feeling of rising excitement, as though one of the Main Reasons for our trip is to be fulfilled. We arrive at Arista’s offices at 1776 Broadway (which must equal the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, for the all-American address).
Well-dressed girls are at desks everywhere. We are given a beer each and the ‘Clive won’t be long now’s’ increase in frequency. At last the moment comes to go into the presence of Him. When I asked if we should kneel, they laughed, but slightly nervously.
The first thing that impressed me about the Great man of the American Recording Business was his office. He had the kind of exaggerated fifteen-foot desk which we write into sketches, and yet you could see he needed it. It was full of papers, letters ready for signing, telephones, intercoms, etc, etc. There seemed to be no acreage which was just added on for show. Around the walls were at least twenty gold discs, pictures of him with his family, citations from the Pope and an embossed certificate for outstanding services to the Jewish community in New York. Huge sofas and beautiful speakers and a washroom attached.
He was evidently concerned about spending money on this launch party without being sure of getting something out of the function – i.e. a little sketch from us, perhaps, a short appearance, a few jokes. He was clearly feeling his way with the Python group. He may be World Expert on Dylan, Sonny and Cher and Blood Sweat and Tears, but one got the feeling he was not yet certain about why he liked Python or why others liked Python. He was at the stage of simply being aware that people did like Python.
Like a fussy mother with new-born chicks, Davis ushered us into the lift. He twinkled, smiled, joked about the pouring rain in Broadway, ‘We had it specially imported to make you feel at home’, and got us all taxis. Then he bustled us into Sardi’s, waiting until we’d all handed in our coats before leading us upstairs. Some 150 folk were assembled.
Clive said a few words, we joked a little and then the ‘Thomas Hardy Novel-Writing’ track was played. I had to pinch myself to believe it was all happening. Were we really in Sardi’s, the renowned Broadway restaurant, with Clive Davis, the renowned record producer, surrounded by a crowd ‘ooohing!’ and ‘aaahing’ with uncertain delight as a not brilliant sketch about Thomas Hardy writing a novel was played over a hastily rigged-up record player system? No, it couldn’t be true, I’d finally flipped. Then was everything afterwards untrue? Did a stout little lady with a Middle European accent keep badgering me about Swiss rights to Monty Python? Did the wife of Bill Ryan of Esquire magazine really claim that Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book had made her laugh so much it had cured her back pains?
Tuesday, March 11th, New York
Another fitful night’s sleep. Terry came in about 10.00 bearing a note from two Python groupies which had been slipped under his door last night. Jones and Palin Ltd were offered a good time in New York, by two fans who were hopelessly in love with us and had waited in the bar for five hours last night.
But we had no time for that sort of stuff. Oh, no, another Herculean day lay ahead. I felt better in my stomach today, and enjoyed a French lunch at a restaurant called Mont St Michel, in the quiet and civilised company of the cravatted John O’Connor of the New York Times.
Later, whilst lying flat out, but sleepless on my bed, the phone rang, and one of the co-authoresses of Terry’s letter gave me a ring. They were downstairs. But this schedule has ruined me in more ways than one, and I mumbled excuses, saying that I was, well … I was no fun at the moment!
Unfortunately TJ had asked his fan to ring back later and therein lies a grand tale. TJ was back in his room at 12.30 (after a Chinese meal we’d had together with Ina Lee Meibach and others at the Hunan Yin) when the phone rang and the persistent Python groupie told TJ she was in the lobby and would like to see him – but couldn’t because ‘they’ wouldn’t let her up to his room. Here TJ, sensing a cause, and especially one against Marriotts, made the wrong move of the evening and went downstairs. True enough, two armed guards stood by the lift and forbad TJ to take this lady up to his room.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall, for TJ, by his own account, went berserk. All the bitterness of the TWA food and the static which afflicted him unmercifully and the noisy air-conditioning, must have poured out at these poor heavily armed men. But they insisted that Terry must pay if they were to let the girl into the room. So they obviously weren’t anti-hookers, they were perpetuating a system whereby hookers were OK if Marriotts got a rake-off. So Terry’s wrath was well-directed and in the end he defied these thugs and got the girl upstairs. It was only then that he discovered that she was a heavy lady of un-outstanding features and by no means a beautiful princess rescued from the jaws of the dragon. The next morning Terry was therefore full of shame, he said, but the story is such a classic that I think it worthy of this full account.
Wednesday, March 12th, Barclay Hotel, Philadelphia
I never imagined, and certainly from hearing the opinions of Americans on the subject, I was never encouraged to imagine, that Philadelphia would be an improvement on New York. In fact it’s like being released from jail. The Amtrak ride from Penn Central in New York is through some of the most dreary, miserable landscape in the world, a vast dumping ground – Manhattan’s colostomy bag – but, in just the four hours we’ve been here, I’ve felt like a bird released from a cage. Now this may have something to do with the fact that my room looks out over the city and is on the twenty-first floor, rather than the dungeon in the Essex House which looked out on brick wall and more brick wall, but, for instance, I just heard a clock chiming – and I haven’t heard that since I left London. There is light and space and air here. But unfortunately there is no time. We have done two newspaper interviews already in our twenty-first-floor suite and are about to go out to dinner … God! How food terrifies me now … I just can’t wait to not see it. And after that there is a radio inter— I can’t go on, I must go and change, my phone is being paged and my door banged on.
Thursday, March 13th, Philadelphia
The morning spent at the Philadelphia PBS TV studios. We recorded some direct, almost sincere, straight-to-camera promos, extolling the thinking man’s channel. Then, from somewhere, they conjured up a rather nervously cheerful lady, who was going to interview us. She looked afraid but, on discovering we were nice lads, loosened up. Typical of the refreshingly disorganised set-up – this ten-minute chat suddenly took off when the director snapped his fingers and cried ‘Hey, if you give me 15 minutes to get another camera, we could make this a 30-minute special!’ And a 30-minute special it became.
Left Philly at 3.45 with fond memories. Arrived in Washington about 5.00. We have a sumptuous suite in the Watergate Complex, overlooking the Potomac. (A dirty river, a lady reporter told me – especially where it flows past the Pentagon, where it is full of used prophylactics.) I go around stuffing my case full of anything marked ‘Watergate’ – soap, writing paper, even, to Graham’s irritation, the room service menu.
Saturday, March 15th, Dallas
We are driven into, or almost into, Dallas, to an incongruous looking fifteen-storey hotel set in the Oak Lawn area – full of attractive weather-boarded houses. We learnt later that these are the only old houses allowed to survive in this rich and developing city. My room at the Stoneleigh Park Hotel is quite stupendous. The bedroom has views on two sides and an eight-foot-wide, beautifully comfortable bed. A bathroom, generously proportioned, is attached, but the star turn is a long sitting-room – forty feet long at least – furnished in th
e Empire style, with elegant sofas, chaises longues, and Watteau reproductions on the wall.
Drove down to the PBS station, to find ourselves facing a barrage of microphones and reporters, who sat amongst the scenery and props, barring our way to the studio. I have never seen anything like it. Admittedly, most of the microphones belonged to young fresh-faced lads with cheap Philips cassette recorders and none of the mikes had NBC, ABC or CBS News stuck on the end, but this was the first time any of us have ever experienced this saturation coverage. Every word was recorded or written down, questions fell fast, one on top of the other, as did the answers. It could have been awful, but as it was so spontaneous it was exhilarating.
There are a great many people out here who do want to know all about Monty Python. It’s as genuine, simple and direct as that. And, as a result, the self-consciousness I had always felt about talking about ourselves to English journalists, etc, does not apply here. One can answer directness only with directness.
After the ‘press conference’ we are moved through into the studio, which is packed, mostly with young people, college kids, and one or two 30—40-ish liberals. I am handed a rather fine stuffed armadillo, as a present from Dallas. This I hang on to throughout the interviews.
The next few hours are all handled very informally. We are in chairs on a podium and are chatted to at regular intervals by Ron Devillier,1 programme director of the station. A lovely man, comfortably built, soft-voiced, bearded, about 35-40, with a lack of pretension and a great deal of knowledge and intelligence. Ron asks people, as usual, to ring in with pledges of money and buy membership of Channel 13 for a year. The phones ring behind and an army of volunteers answer them.
Graham establishes on the air that he is a supporter of gay causes – and gets a greater number of appreciative and enquiring calls from viewers than anyone else.
During the course of the evening they played no less than three Python shows. It was an orgy of Python – a total immersion in total enthusiasm, that didn’t end until after 12.00. Thankfully we disengaged ourselves and, with about ten folk from the station, went to a tatty nearby clapboard house for a quite superb Mexican meal.
I still had the armadillo with me when I got back to the hotel room and, later that night, frightened myself with it quite considerably when I went for a pee.
Sunday, March 16th, Navarro Hotel, New York
Ron Devillier picked us up at 12.00 and took us for a drive round Dallas. Devillier, clearly no lover of the downtown area – though he lives in Dallas – shows us the Kennedy Memorial, which it took eight years to put up. He says that now it is hard to imagine how much people in Dallas hated President Kennedy and all he stood for. After his assassination, classes of schoolkids cheered and a teacher who tried to give her class a day off in Kennedy’s memory was fired.
We eventually found ourselves at the scene of the shooting. What struck me most was the eerie ordinariness of the spot. Possibly I’d expected the area to be razed to the ground, but here we were, on a cool March Sunday, standing on the most famous – the only famous – grassy knoll in the world, looking up at the Book Depository windows from which Oswald had fired, and across to the road, narrow by American standards, where Kennedy had been shot. The strongest impression is that Oswald must have been a genius to fire three times accurately from that angle, at a car travelling away from him down a sloping road. Second impression is that the grassy knoll, besides offering a much closer and easier view of the target, was an ideal place for an assassin to escape from. An expanse of open railway land, away from streets, cars, sightseers.
As we walked back to Ron’s car and drove down towards the railway bridge, I reflected on how much more far-reaching an event had taken place here than the great and utterly anti-climactic triumph of America – the landing on the moon. The ‘60s and the ‘70s are notable for their disasters, not their triumphs.
American Airlines flight to NY. At La Guardia, as I wait for our luggage, with my armadillo’s explicit and rather white rear end sticking out from under my arm, a heavily furred and expensively coiffed American lady drawls at me, ‘Where d’you get that?’ I explained I was given it by some friends in Texas. She obviously couldn’t comprehend this … ‘Well, I’m from Texas and I wouldn’t have given you a thing like that.’
We are spared the Essex House Hotel again and stay instead at the Navarro, also on Central Park South. This is a smart, pleasant hotel, which is mercifully not part of a chain. A comfortable suite – this time on the 12th floor and overlooking Central Park.
. I have a bath and, feeling greatly refreshed and looking forward to an evening with no interviews, TV phones to answer or any promotional activity of any kind, skip through the NY Sunday Times, and then down to the bar to meet Nancy. But the day is not to end totally pleasantly, for Nancy is suddenly recognised by Kit Lambert, manager, or ex-manager, of The Who (whose film Tommy opens in NY on Tuesday). He shouts, there is much embracing as of old friends, and he joins us at our table. He is quite obviously in an emotional state. Though he is clearly aware that we are all listening, he seems anxious to hire Nancy to work for him and offers her £1,000 a day. Nancy laughs it politely away and remains noncommittal. But Lambert has an even less tolerable friend, an English accountant, who laughs gratuitously and ingratiatingly at Lambert. He tries to chat up the waitress and makes a thoroughly unpleasant mess of it.
A young boy arrives, sits quietly and eyes the decaying Lambert with a mixture of disappointment and disgust. After a half-hour that seems like a lifetime, the festering and smouldering atmosphere is relieved by the arrival of a girl, who is also English and clearly has the unenviable task of fixing dinner for this frightful threesome. After an hour, they leave. I had warmed to Lambert in the meantime. At least he sounded bright – he reminded me of the hero of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, with often flashes of a brilliant display of knowledge – of languages, literary references, etc. And so it didn’t come as a great surprise to hear from Nancy that he is a brilliant failure. He is suing, or being sued by, The Who, who now clearly try and avoid him. He has a self-destructive urge, which takes the form at present of regular over-indulgence in cocaine and alcohol – and from his face (a handsome face) and general bearing, it looked sadly as though he was doing a good job of it.1
Monday, March 17th, New York
Back to promotion with a vengeance today.
A photographer was trying to get some zany photos. ‘Could you all lie on the bed as if you’re dead, please? “No,’ was the easiest and most painless reply. Once again we have to go into our spiel about not doing zany pictures. It now sounds like some sort of religious thing – like Jews not eating pork. But in the end we used the armadillo a lot and that seemed to keep him happy.
Down to the bar for lunch and a drink with Rik Hertzberg and friend from the New Yorker. We ate looking out over Central Park South and the very well-heeled class of persons passing by. Definitely one of the world’s superior sidewalks. At one point a man came in and shook us all by the hand. I don’t know who he was, but later he rang, saying he was a film producer and would like to ‘talk over some ideas’. While we were thus on display, and chatting very pleasantly (Rick seems the nearest to one of us we’ve met), they pointed out a man who was apparently well-known in NY for star-spotting. He spends all his time outside hotels approaching people indiscriminately and asking them if they’re celebrities. He then takes an autograph off them. Rick guaranteed that if any of us popped out of the elegant revolving door of the Navarro, we would be accosted instantly. We tried it with Terry Jones with total lack of success. Terry even hung around waiting to be recognised. Finally, in some disappointment, Rick buttonholed the star-spotter and said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask your usual question?’ He viewed Terry rather sceptically and then said … ‘OK, can you lend me ten bucks?’
Tuesday, March 23th
Grand Python reunion at the recording studio!1 [Neither Eric nor John had come on the US publicity tour.] All of us, except T
erry Gilliam, contributing. John C had written a piece about a Professor of Logic. We recorded it first time. I think John’s psychiatrist should be sent a copy. It was a funny piece, largely, but loaded with rather passionless and violent sexual references, which sounded odd, for some reason. But there was a generally convivial atmosphere – and we had an excellent lunch at Cheung-Cheung-Ki, about fifty yards down Wardour Street.
We decided that our next film would be ‘Monty Python and the Life of Christ’ – with Graham as Christ, and featuring exciting new characters like Ron the Baptist. We also decided with remarkably little fuss that we would all get together to do a six-week stage show in the US next spring.
Terry and I much brightened this evening, when we go to talk to Helen Dawson of The Observer,2 who had just seen the film on her own. TJ had raced around that morning all in a tizzy trying to prevent her seeing it. Terry has this quite reasonable theory that comedy is best enjoyed with an audience of over 1,000, preferably packed closely together – but from this he has drawn the erroneous conclusion that no-one can enjoy comedy except in a crowd of over 1,000. Helen Dawson turned out to have loved the film and laughed at all the right places and even at the Knights of Ni! She talked to us for a half-hour or so. She’s a lively, capable little lady. Needless to say we both warmed to her! Terry confided that this time last night he had been unhappy because Sheridan Morley3 had disliked the film.’Great!’ she said, ‘If Sheridan Morley didn’t like it, you’re alright.’ And she didn’t say it with any malice.
Wednesday, March 26th
To London Weekend Studios for a Saturday morning children’s show with Michael Wale and an audience of kids doing the interviews.
They showed two clips of the Holy Grail film and then the kids asked questions. First was ‘How much do you think John Cleese was missed in the last series?’ I went on about how we lacked an authority figure, etc, etc, at the end of which Terry said, ‘Well, we really ought to ask you that question.’ ‘Oh, I didn’t think it was half as good without him,’ came the smart reply. The last question was from M Wale, who asked us what we thought of the Goodies. Up spoke young Jones and denounced the Goodies publicly for trivialising serious topics and having no values. The interview ended with a Geordie jug band group throwing eggs at us.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 31