Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  ‘Really quite enjoy flashing a naughty part of the body in a public place – and getting paid rather than arrested for it.’ Jabbenvocky filming at Chepstow Castle. (September 16th, 1976)

  ‘I like my gear. At least its going to be a deal more comfortable than the armour of Holy Grail’ As Dennis Cooper in Jabberwocky. (July Hth, 1976)

  Helen and our friend Ranji, Amsterdam, 1971.

  Perks of being a director of Shepperton studios; submarine cannon from the film Hie Land That Time Forgot, is saved from the rubbish tip and ends up in my back garden, 1978.

  All in all a very jolly morning – when people started going through their pieces it was like an old folk’s nostalgia evening. Alan Bennett did his ‘Norwich’ telegram piece, Eleanor Bron some witty Michael Frayn material -performed with her stunning, but sometimes quite alarming sense of realism. John Bird arrived, looking windswept and awry, as if just woken from a very long sleep, just in time to rehearse his Idi Amin speech.

  By way of a complete contrast Barry Humphries swanned elegantly in, fedora at a rakish angle, smart herringbone suit on and giving off a delicately perfumed fragrance. He was off to a dinner engagement so couldn’t stay long.

  Roger Graef and team filmed away, drawn to Jonathan M, as far as one could tell, like moths round a flame. The more I see of them at work, the more dangerous I think it is for them to give the impression in their programmes that they are following and revealing everything important as it happens. Their own selectivity dictates the programme.

  Robert H round in the evening. We finalise details about Chris Orr’s Ruskin book, which is to be a Signford1 publication. They’ll print 1,500 copies and I’ll put in £1,500.

  Monday, March 29th

  Lunch with Terry H at the Arlecchino in Notting Hill Gate to discuss script of’Moorstones’ and ‘Andes by Frog’. Terry J also there.

  Terry J talks of what a wonderful unit Python was together, how we functioned best then. I feel I’m functioning best now – with my hard-won independence. It’s not selfishness or conceit, it’s just to do with avoiding the wear and tear on the nervous system.

  Shopping in the King’s Road all afternoon, then dropped in to see Nigel [Greenwood] at the gallery. He was in, the gallery was empty. It was six o’clock, so it gave him an excuse to bring out the scotch. We drank and chatted for an hour. I told him about Robert and the Ruskin book. He was interested to know who was publishing, as he himself publishes books. He’s just spent thousands on a Gilbert and George2 book which the printers have heavily fucked up.

  He said that, although the gallery has a very experimental attitude and is known for showing the most unconventional and outrageous works, the artists he shows don’t like the gallery world … Nigel a bit resigned, but rather rueful about this.

  Wednesday, March 31st

  The Amnesty bandwagon gathers momentum today – a second and final rehearsal on stage at Her Majesty’s, with Roger Graef and team poking about. I notice them filming, at great length, a conversation between Cleese and Peter Cook on the stage, and it occurs to me that, as the cameraman himself is small (or average) compared to them, he’s probably much happier filming tall people. I asked Graef whether I would be a better bet for tele-verité if I were six inches taller … ‘Oh, yes, undoubtedly,’ he assured me. They can get lovely angles if you’re tall – shots against the sky, or, in this case, against the spotlights.’ Yesterday they’d been filming the Goodies at rehearsal and the cameraman had found Bill Oddie quite a problem.

  Peter Cook – who apologised for his slightly glazed state, saying he was recovering from a long night spent with John Fortune discussing Lenny Bruce’s drug problem – steadfastly refuses to learn the words of the Condemned Man in our ‘Court Sketch’. He does ad-lib very well, but it gives Terry J a few hairy moments.

  At about 12.30, more press photos outside. For some reason a Daily Mirror photographer issues us all with pickaxes – no-one knows why until we see the photo in the Mirror on April ist with the caption ‘Pick of the Jokers’. No wonder the Mirror are losing their circulation battle.

  Thursday, April 1st

  At the theatre the last of the bare-breasted Ipi-Tombi dancers1 are leaving (in sensible Jaeger sweaters and two-piece suits!). Neil’s band Fatso are heaving in their equipment. Outside in King Chas II Street the Manor Mobile Recording Studios are parked with cables and wires running into the stage door.

  People milling around. We’re all in one dressing room – Cook, Bird, Jones, Gilliam, Cleese, (not Bron), Bennett – all of us plus Roger Graef’s camera and mike, which searches around picking up snatches of conversation here and there. Brief’Lumberjack Song’ rehearsal. A book is opened at P Cook’s instigation on the length of the show.

  Curtain up at 11.35. Jonathan and I walk out. Me sweeping the stage, him directing me. Then into ‘Pet Shop’ and we’re away. First half runs till 1.00. JM does some ruthless cutting of the second half. Eleanor and Johnny Lynn2fed up their bits have been excised, but so has ‘Crunchy Frog’.

  Roar of recognition and applause (still!) on things like ‘Argument’, ‘Lumberjack’ and ‘Pet Shop’. End with making a balls-up of ‘Lumberjack Song’. I start too early, try again – too flat – try again and we get through it.

  Many curtain calls at the end, though – they really enjoyed it. It’s 2.15 and Roger Graef is filming’after the show’ atmos. Feel tired, depressed, just want a scotch.

  Saturday, April 3rd

  Probably the best night of all tonight, though ‘Argument’ is cut for time and Graham is boisterously drunk. Alan Bennett feigns mock-horror in the dressing room as Graham, at his most baroque, is fondling Terry J as he changes. ‘Oh dear,’ says Alan to Jonathan, shaking his head with a worried frown, ‘We never used to do that sort of thing. We never used to touch each other.’

  Graham and Peter make a strange pair – both with inflated eyes and a sort of boozy calm which can and does easily flare up. Graham’s bête noire tonight, and not for the first time, is Bill Oddie. Tonight is the only night the Goodies appear. They are in a different world from everyone else in the show, with their ‘Funky Gibbon’ pop numbers, complete with dance movements – a rather gluey, trad, middle-of-the-road Top of the Pops appearance.

  John Bird has useful suggestion for ‘Court Sketch’, which I worked on hard tonight. He says I’m doing my Prosecutor in the same way as Cleese (i.e. starting with outrage and working up from there) and I should play it differently. Good thinking.

  We may have made £15,000 or £16,000 for Amnesty from the three nights.

  Sunday, April 4th

  A winding-down day. No need to prepare for America until tomorrow. So just enjoy, for once, the laziness of Sunday. Up at 9.15 – no adverse effects from Amnesty show – brain damage, throat damage, hangover, etc. Feel in good shape. Buy croissants and papers up at South End Green.

  Spend a couple of hours in the evening working my way through the entire American show, trying to look carefully at characters, possible rewrites for US audiences, dangerously difficult English regional accents, etc, etc. I feel it’s very important to sit quietly and work out one’s own problems before we reach New York. After tonight’s session, I feel I know the show much better and, if we suddenly had to put it on tomorrow, we could.

  Tuesday, April 6th, New York

  Sunshine in New York and a freshness in the air – a perfect spring afternoon. First sight of our home for the next four weeks, our very own brownstone in East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues.1 No. 242, once home (still sometimes the home, I presume) of a writer, Garson Kanin,2 and his actress wife Ruth Gordon. A feeling of euphoria swept over me as I explored its four floors – none of which had a room, a picture, a piece of furniture, an ornament, an element of any kind which wasn’t pleasing without being pretentious. There were no disappointments – no dingy back rooms or peeling wallpapers or Formica partitions – and, at the same time, no forbidding luxuries. Though it’s clearly the home of wealth
y, or once-wealthy collectors and high-livers, it has a comfortable, warm friendliness about it.

  As if the house itself (complete with library) wasn’t a joy in itself, it backs on to a Spanish-style pattern of gardens, known as Turtle Bay Gardens. Courtyards with trees and flowering shrubs and daffodils and a fountain – again, like the house, cosy, comfortable, peaceful in the heart of a city which is unceasingly noisy.

  I bounded around the house, probably boring TJ stiff with constant and repetitious enthusiasm.

  Wednesday, April yth, New York

  Woke about 4.00, feeling distinctly unsleepy.

  The incessant hum of New York begins to build up to what is, by Oak Village standards, an early-morning roar. It’s almost like a magnet, drawing you up and out, defying you to stay in your bed, defying you not to get involved.

  Later in the morning a huge black limousine swishes up outside and drives Terry J and myself plus Carol and Terry G to the helipad on the East River, whence we are to be airlifted over the steel mills and scrap yards of the Garden State. In about 40 minutes Philadelphia can be glimpsed on the horizon straight ahead – a cluster of tower blocks and skyscrapers rising skywards like a petrified explosion.

  We land on the roof of a bank, and are whisked downstairs and across the road to the Westinghouse TV Studios where the Mike Douglas Show is recorded. We’re told it’s the biggest regular single TV audience in the world – 40 million watch each show.

  He showed two good clips from the TV Pythons and the Black Knight fight in its entirety from the film. The Black Knight fight contrasted nicely with the clean teeth and the ‘He-Tan’ make-up of all the guests. There was Ron Vereen, who didn’t need He-Tan as he was black, but wore a very well-tailored Savile Row suit and kept smiling. And there was Gabriel Kaplan, a TV comic who kept smiling and another TV actor called David Soul, who was very blond and slightly embarrassed when Terry J sat on his knee after we’d all been introduced. But I did get to meet one of the folk-heroes of my youth – in fact I sat next to him and smiled along with him for all the forty million viewers to see – Neil Sedaka, writer and singer of great hits of my teenage years, made-up lavishly, like a badly restored painting. ‘You guys are just crazy,’ he cooed.

  Thursday, April 8th, New York

  This time I must have woken even earlier – 3.30 or so. I tend to wake up with that momentary flash of terror, as if something really nasty is going to happen today. I chase the feeling away quickly enough, but I suppose it will continue to be there until the show has opened, settled into a routine and the pressure on us to be brilliant and successful is relaxed.

  About 8.00 get up, do a half hour of voice exercises, soak in the bath and read a little Pirsig,1 which concentrates the mind wonderfully. Coffee for breakfast downstairs, then a 25 minute walk across town to our rehearsal room near Broadway. Big, functional, mirrored rehearsal room.

  Bad news of the day is that Eric has been ill in bed since yesterday and may have a mono-something or other – a liver problem – and be bad enough for us at least to discuss an alternative show if he couldn’t make it.

  The rehearsal is quite gruelling and, around 1.00, a rather aged and slow camera crew arrive with a pleasant, dumpy compere to film us rehearsing for use on a news/current affairs show later this evening. They are certainly no Roger Graefs, and the result is an extra hour of rehearsal, until after 2.00. Everyone is a little short-tempered and, when the interviewer finally interviews each one of us and says he wants us to be as loony and silly as we want, the numbing feeling of being rats in a cage comes over me again. We manage some facetiousness and paltry slapstick.

  Terry and I have an evening appointment with the singular Mr Cordon, our publisher. He meets us in the lobby of the Yale Club, on Park and Vanderbilt. Classical columns, and old group photographs. We are both given ties to wear and copies of Dr Fegg’s Nasty Book of Knowledge — our first sight of the completed new American version of Fegg. Both of us are very pleased with the look of it. Steve is full of disparaging banter. It’s cost them far more than they’ll ever get back, he says. The recent batch of alterations finally broke the chances of economic success and anyway the book is stuck at the printers in Wisconsin because of stroppy truckers.’Goddamn truckers rule this goddamn country,’ he grunts sourly, then breaks into a broad grin and introduces us eagerly to a man called Marvin Goldwater, who is president of ‘Beards of America’ and cousin of Barry, the Vietnam Hawk himself.

  Saturday, April 10th, New York

  Beginning, slowly, to relax into New York pattern of life.

  A lunch in our garden in the sun with Neil and Yvonne, Miles and Luke1 and Al Levinson – looking tanned (from Jamaica), curly-haired and broad-shouldered. As he quotes someone in one of his poems as saying on first meeting him:’I cannot imagine you indoors’. Al brought, apart from jokes and good company, a bit of New York intellectual class and a bottle of scotch for the house.

  At 2.00 the others (bar Eric) begin to arrive and we have a very good three hour rehearsal upstairs at 242. Al remarked on how well we mixed and how there was no apparent leader.

  Nancy arrived and she and I went round to Stephen Sondheim’s house, next door but one. SS’s housekeeper, Louis, apparently organises cleaners, etc, for 242. The Sondheim house is decorated in a more modern and much more opulent style than 242 – yet with carefully restrained taste. Full of remarkable surprises, too. One room full of antique nineteenth and twentieth century games – early skittle alleys, very old pinball machines.

  Louis – Spanish, I should think, small, chunky, camp, with a ready smile and friendly open manner. Very excited to meet a Python. He shows me a copy of New Yorker for the week, which contains a long article by Hertzberg about the court case in December. A long and very accurate article with quotes from Gilliam and myself – ‘Michael Palin, charming and boyish’!

  On the way downstairs I meet the distinguished Mr Sondheim. He shakes hands briefly, distractedly, as he flits from one room into another with a grand piano in it.

  Tuesday, April 13th, New York

  Lunch at Ina’s office, where a Python business meeting has been called to discuss offers of a TV special to be made of the show. Terry J is, as usual, the chief originator of doubt about the project. He wants a Roger Graef-style film of the stage show, whereas Ina thinks we can only sell a TV special of the show, to be made after the end of the run at the Ed Sullivan Theater. TJ and TG against, John keen to earn the extra £3,000 we’re promised for doing it. I urge that we examine more carefully what is involved in moving the show to another theatre and preparing it for TV. It’s all being sold to us as a two day extension – I think we’ll be here an extra week!

  Really I couldn’t care less. Here we are all being encouraged to be very greedy and complicate our lives further, when we have a theatre opening down the road in a day and a half and we haven’t even been on the stage.

  Two incidents at the end of this unsatisfactory meeting. John, who has been lying on the floor to ‘relax his shoulders’, gets up and, as he does so, dislodges a huge picture on the wall, which crashes down on his foot, eliciting Fawlty-like shrieks of pain and explosive anger. I think he really did shake his fist at it. Then we find he actually has sliced a bit of flesh off his heel and he is sat down and a doctor called. It’s his ‘Silly Walks’ foot too.

  Wednesday, April 14th, New York

  One of those totally gruelling days that only happen in the theatre and, if they didn’t have to happen, the theatre would invent them.

  Breakfast of fresh orange juice, grapefruit and scrambled eggs and bacon at Francine’s – a coffee shop across the street from the stage door. Eric came in

  – he’s all right.

  10.00 into the theatre, past the small knot of girls who seem to have already taken up permanent residence there. An a.m. technical stagger-through, topping and tailing.

  In the afternoon, a dress rehearsal. Our first and only, despite Hazel’s usual protestations. I seem to have the most
changes, seventeen or eighteen. Gloria, my dresser, a Patricia Neal look-alike, looks worried, but I’m told she’s 100% reliable. One thing that irritates me about the afternoon run, which is so important to us, is that we have not been warned – or I have not been warned – that the press has been allowed in.

  I felt even more cross by the little production chat we had at 6.00. No-one smiled. Anne frowned, Allen Tinkley [our producer] frowned, they all seemed to be deeply gloomy and I just wanted to get away from them all and do the show.

  At 8.00, almost punctually, the curtain rose to prolonged applause and cheers.

  The whole show went predictably well, with very few problems and the usual reaction of ecstatic recognition of sketches. The only trouble spot was the ‘Court Sketch’, which was running 15 minutes and failed to work at any stage and ‘The Death of Mary Queen of Scots’ which was too long.

  Afterwards I felt hugely relieved. My voice had survived four run-throughs in two days, which it would never have done before Cicely Berry, and the reaction to the show was as good as it had ever been. I think we’re in for an enjoyable run.

  Charisma gave us an after-show party at Orsons. That’s where the voices really become strained – not during the shows! Tomorrow the family arrives.

  Thursday, April 15th, New York

  A complete change in the weather today. The temperature has hurtled up into the 70s and is heading for the 80s and the cool crispness that has made New York so acceptable this past week has been replaced by a clammy balminess.

  A limousine picks us up at the Navarro and takes TJ and me out to Kennedy Airport to meet the families. Small blond heads are glimpsed through the customs shed door at around 1.00 and soon we’re all packed in the limousine heading into NY over the Triborough Bridge.