We talked for an hour or so to the very affable Yugoslav, who told us that there had been many anti-Python protests in Yugoslavia, but that the show had become a rallying point.
Sunday, July 27th
I began work just after 9.00, writing up a couple of new ideas. Terry, Alison and Sally arrived about 10.00 and, whilst Helen packed and Alison and Sally took William up to Parliament Hill and Thomas watched Thunderbirds, Terry and I sat in the increasingly uncomfortable heat of the work-room and slogged away at Fegg with a ferocious concentration.
The room became hotter – outside the temperature was over 80° – and we finally emerged, like the National Union of Railwaymen after an all-day attempt to avert a strike, sweaty, crumpled but happy, at 9.30 in the evening.
We opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated wearily amongst the piles of washing, clothing, toys, cameras and books destined for Italy. For myself, it couldn’t be better timing. To have worked literally to the last moment, and to be able to leave for a month in Europe, after such a mind-draining concentrated spell of work, gives me that warm, satisfied feeling of all the systems being totally and fully used.
After a three-week holiday in Italy with the Davidson family, it was time for yet another trip to New York, this one occasioned by publication of the Fegg book in the US.
Wednesday, September 3rd
All-out onslaught on letters, etc, before leaving for NY tomorrow. The American fan mail is sometimes quite extraordinary. Less restrained than the English. I received one quite steamy letter, full of declarations of love, meant for my eyes only, which ended with the note, ‘I hope you’re the one I mean’, and another from what must be one of the world’s least-known organisations – the Michael Palin Sub-Committee of the Python Fan Club of Apartment 4c, 825 West End Ave, NY.
Thursday, September 4th, New York
To New York again. Very smooth, easy flight from sunny Heathrow at 11.00 to sunny New York at 1.30.
By 4.00 we were at the offices of Berkeley Books at 200 Madison Avenue to meet the publishers and designers of the American Fegg book. Ned Chase, a 50-year-old, who looks lean and well exercised, and has a Harvard correctness to his accent and general bearing (he was at Princeton, in fact) and Steve Conlon, big, white-haired, white-bearded, looking like a slim Burl Ives and using more down-to-earth Americanisms – his speech is littered with ‘son of bitches’ and ‘get the fuck out of its’ – for the publishers. And two younger men – about our age – Mike Gross and David Kaestle, who used to work as staff designers and illustrators on the National Lampoon.
Certainly their work is impressive – they have designed, and Mike Gross has drawn, some of the parodies of famous American artists on the National Lampoon Bicentennial Calendar – which is a calendar devoted entirely to disasters of one kind or another, ranging from assassinations and political scandals to typhoons and mass murders in the 200 years since the US was started.
They are also instantly likeable – because they like Fegg, I suppose – and the combination of their obvious experience and flair and their immediate sympathy with the Fegg character and material made us both very pleased and the meeting quite a success.
Saturday, September 6th, West Granby, Connecticut
Left the Navarro at 8.45 for a weekend in Connecticut at the invitation of Steve Cordon.
My first glimpse of New England. It is like Sussex, only with more space. No black faces up in Northern Connecticut. Houses all of wood are rather attractive, and Steve’s place is magnificent. its a large barn, across the road from a farmhouse, white and weather-boarded, in which lives Steve’s brother Henry (at weekends). Steve and his neat and organised English wife, Bet, have been converting the barn for about thirty years and its now complete. Very fine interior, all open plan except for three guest bedrooms at one end. The original wooden beams complemented with some simple old pieces of wooden furniture, a feeling of comfort, but not luxury. Immediately in front of the barn is a spacious meadow.
So a feeling of space, quietness, and inside the barn, comfortable orderliness. An utter contrast to the throbbing, noisy heartbeats of NYC.
Later in the day two other Berkeley authors arrive. Lyn and Sheila – they wrote a best-seller some years back about research into psychic phenomena in Russia.
The pace quickened and we were joined for cocktails (their word, not mine) and dinner by a local Episcopalian minister, George, who Steve rather carefully made a point of telling us earlier was doing good work with homosexuals, and two local young men, Frank, a teacher in West Hartford – again with a very New English accent – and Charles, another youngish man, with a small moustache and a lazy left eye, who was a violinist and brother-in-law of Ted Sorensen (of Kennedy clan fame). All very jolly.
TJ was in high spirits and expansive good form. I sat beside the violinist and the Episcopalian minister, feeling rather dull. The minister talked softly about his work, describing how he counsels boys who come to see him. ‘I give them the names and addresses of some gay clubs, gay discos, you know, and I tell them go on … off you go, there’s nothing wrong.’
We eat an excellent chicken casserole and a grape and cream concoction for pudding – once again served up by Bet with a sort of clean efficiency which almost detracts from one’s enjoyment.
Steve is a little shirty throughout, as the water supply appears to have run out. The fault is traced to our toilet cistern, which jammed and was left running. I think he is a little cross that the smooth running of the place, which he clearly prides himself on, should be interrupted on tonight of all nights – and I get the feeling he blames it on us.
Sunday, September 7th, West Granby, Connecticut
The sun is high and hot in a clear sky. We visit a nearby store for some last minute provisions. There is a comfortable neatness about the shop – untainted as it is by any slightly exciting food. Buy the New York Times and the Hartford Courant – both with about thirteen sections and several hundred pages – then back to the barn, where we read them lying in the sun. There’s a lunch out of doors, which Bet is extremely proud of – because it is so well organised. All the cold meat and cheese is symmetrical. But in fact the lunch is very congenial and everyone seems a lot more relaxed than yesterday.
A drink in the early evening with Charles and Frank, whom we met last night. They live together in a wooden house on stilts with a fine view from the top of a hill. We drink whisky sours. Frank, whom I like a great deal, gives me a book of early Maurice Sendak drawings, not usually available. He knows Sendak apparently. However cynical one may be of this clean, bland American way of life, the people are exceptionally generous to strangers.
To bring us back to reality with a bump, we watched the first of the new Monty Python series to be shown in the States. It was the ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, ‘Fish Licence’, ‘Long John Silvers v. Gynaecologists’ programme. Strange how many of its items have become legendary, and yet looking at them, TJ and I were amazed and a little embarrassed at how very badly shot everything was. Ian really has improved but, judging by that show, he needed to. Was this really the greatest comedy series ever? Steve slept through it.
Monday, September 8th, New York
Steve wakes us at 6.10. We leave the barn just as it’s getting light – about twenty to seven.
We arrive at Grand Central Station – in dark, dingy bowels, which make Liverpool Street look like some exquisite classical drawing room – at 10.10. Spend the morning and lunchtime and afternoon working on alterations to the Fegg material, in our room at the Navarro.
At 6.00 an historic moment. After three trips and at least a dozen phone calls, I meet Al Levinson, my new American friend, for only the second time. He and wife Eve come to the apartment. Al, big, bronzed, an almost olive colour; his face, I notice, like the bust of the Greek emperor I saw today in the Metropolitan Museum, fine, firm features. He looks serious underneath it all, as though the troubles of the world hung heavy on him when he stopped to think. Anyway, the great relie
f is I really do like him – and we get on easily, without infatuation on either side.
Nancy arrived to join us, so quite an impromptu party got under way before myself, Al and Eve left to have a look at Al’s new house in Gramercy Park, which is right in the heart of nineteenth-century New York. They both clearly love it. The apartment is small, but in a four-storey brownstone which stands on its own, next to a Quaker chapel of the 1860s which has a preservation order on it.
We wound up at Nancy’s drinking wine till after midnight. Met Dave Hermann, DJ of WNEW’s morning show – he promised to wake me in the morning. He tells the story of how he was playing the ‘Fairy Story’ from the Pythons’ second German show on the air and managed just in time to bleep the word ‘tits’. (These progressive stations still have to be careful – after all, they’re spending advertisers’ money.) Then a phone call came through and Dave left the record playing only to hear, as he was winding up the phone call, ‘Because she’s a fucking princess.’
Tuesday, September 9th, New York
Listened to DH’s early-morning programme. Sure enough, at 9.45 he told his audience that somewhere in NY MP and TJ of Monty Python were waking up. He played some music for us, which was very kind and silly.
To Sardi’s restaurant, where we had a truly appalling meal, but did meet Arthur Cantor, a Broadway impresario with a fine sense of the absurdity of it all.
Cantor talks straight and doesn’t try to impress. He would like to know if the Pythons are interested in a stage show in New York at the City Center Theater for three weeks starting April 11th 1976. The theatre is owned by the City of New York, it’s old and has an ornate interior and a seating capacity slightly larger than Drury Lane, though it feels equally intimate – we went to see it after our meal.
I like the theatre, I like the dates, I like the fact that the seat prices would not be as high as they would be on Broadway and I like Arthur Cantor. So I’m converted to a three-week stage show – if Python still exists!
From seeing Cantor and the theatre we go to a final meeting with Gross and Kaestle to look at the page layout. Everyone chips in with ideas and Ned and Steve discuss business, copy runs, initial prints, costings, etc, quite openly. There is no hierarchical aspect to the discussion.
Then we take Steve back to the hotel. Before we leave for the airport, we finish off our wine and beer with Ed Goodgold, Nancy Lewis and Ina Lee M and Steve, her partner.
Ed brought me a couple of cigars for the trip, which I appreciated, but eventually left in the bottom of a chest of drawers, beside a half-used box of sanitary towels left by some previous resident.
Left NY on the 10.00 BA flight.
Friday, September 12th
In the afternoon TJ and I go to the BBC for a meeting with Terry Hughes.
The Tomkinson’s Schooldays scripts arrive with the title ‘Michael Palin Special’ writ large across them. But the meeting with Terry H goes well. Milton Abbas School in Dorset have given us permission to film there, and even to use the boys, provided their faces are not featured. We look through Spotlight. Judy Parfitt looks right to both TJ and myself as the mother, and TH says she’s fun to work with, so she gets a call for the mother’s part. TJ is still to play the School Bully, though TH suggests Ian Ogilvy, who strikes both of us as ideally physically right.
Tuesday, September 16th
Gilliam and Maggie round for a meal this evening – TG to tell me about his Jabberwocky film, which he wants me to write with him. He has an overall plan for the film now, which I like the sound of very much. In addition he has the backing of Sandy Lieberson, an American, who, with the Englishman, David Puttnam, runs Good Times Enterprises, who have a record of backing and setting up better-than-average movies.
I’m undecided about whether to work on Jabberwocky. I like it because it sounds like a starter and I like TG’s sense of excitement about it, and I am quickly infected by his enthusiasm. I’m also very confident that anything he puts his mind to will at least not be dull – but I want to see how successful Tomkinson’s Schooldays will be and how successful Three Men in a Boat will be and I want to find some project of my own.
For all these reasons I hang back.
Friday, September 19th
This evening is the first of John Cleese’s solo efforts – Fawlty Towers – which he’s been working on with Connie for over a year. Angela and Veryan and Michael and Anne Henshaw came round to have dinner and watch it with us. Helen and I were reduced to tear-streaming laughter on one or two occasions, the Henshaws less so and Angela and Veryan (probably put off by the intensity of my reaction) were quite quiet throughout. John has used a very straight and conventional Light Entertainment format in design, casting, film and general subject, but his own creation, Basil Fawlty, rises above all this to heights of manic extraordinariness. It all has the Cleese hallmark of careful, thoughtful, well-planned technical excellence and there was hardly a spare line in the piece or a moment when John wasn’t going utterly spare. Anne said I was clearly enjoying it more because I knew John, but it was by any standards a really hard-working, well-realised performance. Whether he can keep it up, I don’t know. It could become a bore and certainly there are as yet no reserves of warmth or sympathy in the character of Fawlty to help it along.
Thursday, September 25th
I spent the lunch hour in a recording studio doing three voice-overs for Sanderson Wallpaper. I really did it because I wanted to keep my hand in and a voice-over, however dull or badly written it may be, at least requires a bit of application and a little bit of performing. It’s good practice. By the same token I’ve accepted an offer to appear as the guest on two editions of Just a Minute, a Radio 4 quiz game, next week.
Down to Regent’s Park for a Python meeting.
Eric was very positive and I could scarcely believe that it was the same Eric who had berated us all for turning Python into a money-obsessed, capitalist waste of time in this same room in February last year. Eric’s moods should really be ignored, but it’s impossible because he nearly always has a big effect on any meeting. Today it was nice, kind, helpful, constructive Eric.
John had just returned from three days in Biarritz. He was the same as ever, unable to resist a vindictive dig at T Gilliam (on the usual lines of us ‘carrying the animator’ for three years). This didn’t find much support amongst the gathering and squashed TG more than John intended.
Terry J had had a lunch with Michael White, who felt it would be suicidal for us not to make another film this year. Anne said that most ‘advice’ tended this way.
Saturday, September 27th
Thomas woke me, thankfully, at 8.30, with the news that the kitchen was leaking and it was late. He was absolutely right. At quarter past nine I was in mid-Weetabix when the phone rang. It was Stephen Frears – the plugs in his car were wet, could I give him a lift?
So we arrived, the director and I, at Ealing Film Studios, about ten minutes late. Renewed acquaintance with Tim and Stephen (who had done some work on the soundtrack yesterday) and the familiar, darkly sparkling features of Tom S. I was very happy to see them all again.
To work on re-recording the dialogue in lip-synch, as every soundtrack had the noise of the camera boat’s engine in the background. I found it difficult at first to slip into the character of Harris, or indeed the whole tone and atmosphere of the film. I strained for the character and my voice must have come out sharp and shrill, as they kept telling me to relax. But after a rather gruelling morning, I began to settle into it and remembered Stephen’s oft-repeated instructions on the filming to avoid giving Harris a funny voice! It’s a rather daunting way to start the day, though, stuck out in the darkened studio with everyone else behind you in the control room, minutely examining your every word, every nuance, every inflexion.
Tim Curry left at lunchtime. He, poor bugger, has two performances of Travesties this afternoon.
Sunday, September 28th
A fine, fresh, sunny Sunday morning. Glad to be up a
nd climbing into my car when everyone else was still enjoying Sunday lie-ins. Pick up Stephen F in Belsize Village. He was standing in the middle of the unusually quiet and traffic-free crossroads and scanning through the Sunday papers. Rave reviews throughout of Daft as a Brush – his latest film, which went out last Wednesday night. Actually, the rave reviews were reserved for his direction, ‘coolness and sensitivity we have come to associate with him’ and the performances by Jonathan Pryce and Lynn Redgrave.
Anyway, Stephen was clearly pleased as we enjoyed a sunny ride out to west London. He lives for films and the group of technicians – cameramen, makeup, sound, editors, etc – with whom he works are the best in the business, painstakingly collected by Stephen over the years. He seems to have life pared down to essentials. Clothes, cocktail parties, awards, purely prestige jobs don’t interest him, and he doesn’t let them occupy his time or divert his efforts. At the same time, he is a critic – of politics, of the establishment, of the status quo, of television, of films, without ever becoming doctrinaire or predictable.
We worked from 10.00 till 12.15 Monday morning with a couple of one hour breaks. I’d read all the Sunday papers about four times each by the time we finished. Tom’s occasionally sprawled on the floor (with either a sweet or a cigarette in the mouth) writing new lines up to the very last minute. Tom is a writer I trust, too. Like Stephen he is devoted to his craft, and will never accept an easy way out – even the new lines are charged with a special interest, they’re never just fillers.
Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years Page 35