Diaries 1969–1979 The Python Years

by Palin, Michael

  Rang Al in Sag Harbor – a bleary, but heroic voice. He has Terry’s two French lady friends staying with him,2 and has fallen passionately in love with one of them. As Al says, ‘As soon as she slipped her top off when we went bathing in the ocean, I knew she was the girl for me!’ So, stirrings at Sag.

  Denis O’B, eyes sparkling like a child with a new toy, buttonholes each of us with the good news that 600 cinemas throughout the US will be taking Brian by early October and, because of the performance and reputation of the movie so far, Warner’s have been able to do deals split 90-10 with the exhibitors (90 to Warner’s, 10 to the exhibitors). The Grail’s deals were 50—50 usually.

  Thursday, September 13th, New York

  Another early-morning run. It’s becoming addictive. Up to 96th Street and back by 7.35. The good weather goes on.

  To the Navarro for an interview (me and TG) for Chapter One, a publishing magazine. Then at twelve I stand in for Eric in an interview for the Washington Post book column.

  We chat for a half-hour, but I take a while to settle, having been far more rattled than I should have been by El’s outburst over our Tom Snyder Tomorrow show interview. Eric, who has become far more obsessed with the interviews than I would have expected from such a press-hater (he’s already looked at our Good Morning America on tape twice), berates me for mentioning the Gay News blasphemy case and the Jorgen Therson Sex Life of Christ in the same breath as Brian.

  The Snyder interview was not just about Brian – that got good plugs – it was also about censorship, and that’s why I instanced the two cases. It’s a one o’clock in the morning show, it was a relief to be able to talk about our concerns in some detail – and it now turns out that Eric is in favour of censorship – at least in interviews, which I can’t accept.

  Back to the Navarro – this in itself quite an exciting little trip, as The Who’s fans are thick outside the hotel, and word has gotten around that Pythons and George Harrison are also in there. George walks with practised skill, firmly ahead and steadfastly refusing to even see anybody. ‘Pretend they’re invisible, it’s the only way.’

  At Terry Gilliam’s apartment, with fine views of the New York canyons below, a party develops. Eric is by now utterly mellow and a quite changed man. He apologises for this morning’s episode and says he has since rung a friend in LA, who thought the Tomorrow interview was very good.

  A photographer from the Post has now joined Cindy Stivers, the Post reporter. We pose for photographs outside the restaurant – all lying slumped on the pavement with empty gin bottles. Will we regret it in the morning?

  Friday, September 14th, New York

  This morning I passed a paper on the newsstand called Home Reporter, with a banner front page: ‘Clergy Ban Python Film’. Inside a massively-misinformed report of the movie (Brian is Christ, of course), being banned in England and how a new group calling themselves Citizens Against Blasphemy are planning a demonstration on Sunday to try and get the film taken off here. Also notice that the New York Post carries a spread of drunken Pythons lying on the sidewalk outside a New York restaurant.

  Finish reading TG’s Brazil script. Rather dull characters complicate an otherwise quite striking visual feel. Later in the evening, when we are all taken to Elaine’s by Denis and George, TG and I talk about it. He’s near desperation on the script – knows what needs to be done, but can’t do it himself.

  Champagne in my suite with Al Levinson and Claudie, the French lady to whom he has lost his heart. She is indeed lovely – slim, long dark hair framing a small face with lively eyes. She is obviously quite taken aback by the champagne and Plaza style – and when George H comes down to join us for a drink, her smashing eyes widen to 70 mill. George, so nice and so straight, disarms her.

  He brings a tape of some Hoagy Carmichael1 songs – one of which he’s thinking of recording – whilst the remains of Hurricane Frederick finally reach Manhattan with a brief but impressive display of lightning and sheeting rain outside.

  Sunday, September 16th

  By limousine to the 59th Street helicopter terminal, where the Warner Bros chopper awaits to take us to Fisher’s Island.

  As we whirl up over the East River and over La Guardia Airport, read the visitors’ book. It’s headed by Frank and Barbara Sinatra.

  Below, a perfect day. Hundreds of yachts fill Long Island Sound and we keep at a 120-mph speed and a height of 2,000 feet and maintain course up the mainland shoreline, with a clear view of the Good Life of America below us. Sailing boats, swimming pools, houses on the water – a huge, middle-class commuter belt stretches, unbroken by farmland or parkland, right up the NY and Connecticut coast as far as New London, where we turn and head across the untroubled blue waters to Fisher’s Island.

  Up the length of the island, swing round over the point and then down onto the gravel pathway right outside Denis’ front door.

  In the evening, after dinner, George and Eric bring guitars out, and we sing the oldies – including many Beatles songs which George can’t remember.

  Monday, September 17th, White Caps, Fisher’s Island

  A leisurely breakfast – banana bread and corn bread and nut, honey and cream spreads, and good, fresh fruit and tasty coffee – discreetly provided by the two girls in the kitchen.

  Then to business. Denis had softened us up the night before, when we had a pre-meeting meeting to discuss agendas, etc, so it was no surprise to us when he began his pitch this morning by strongly advising a sooner-rather-than-later schedule on the new movie. The argument being that he would like to strike while Brian is hot and likely to get hotter with the 600-cinema release this coming Thursday.

  Warner’s want a deal, and Paramount too. Denis reckons at the moment he can, with a few trimmings, go to Warner’s and get a percentage of gross deal. Something like 10 or 15% of gross – which means 10 or 15 cents of every dollar paid at the box-office. (Usually this would be a percentage of distributor’s gross.) He would like to try and prise Grail away from Cinema 5 and and give it to Warner’s together with our German Film as a double-bill pot-boiler for next summer.

  Enthused by Denis’ evangelical approach, and in good spirits because of Brian’s success here, there is little opposition to a tighter schedule to the new movie than that discussed at L’Etoile in mid-August. In fact, by the end of the morning session we have agreed to a delivery date for the finished movie in November 1981. Shooting would be in March/April 1981.

  Before lunch we held a Monty Python Walking on the Water competition in the swimming pool. I got slightly further than Terry.

  Tuesday, September 18th, Fisher’s Island

  After breakfast we spread out on Denis’ impeccably well-chosen sofas and armchairs and begin our first group session on the fourth film.

  It’s rather a desultory affair.

  I think that JC brings up the same sequence that he did when we first began Brian. In which a spacecraft with alien beings looking just like us lands. The beings emerge, give a stirring message of hope to the world, turn to re-enter their ship and find they’ve locked themselves out.

  Other suggestions are a sci-fi movie of a vision of the future where everything’s almost exactly the same. Or a state of war – but a war which is always in the background. Or a vision of hell, or Monty Python’s ‘Utopia’.

  Denis, walking by the pool, looks anxiously at us for signs of A Great Breakthrough or A Hugely Commercial Idea, or at the very least some outward and visible sign that genius has been at work.

  After lunch we desert the sun reluctantly and listen to Denis describing the ‘structuring’ of our future earnings.

  In a scenario which is more like what one reads in the back of Private Eye, Denis tells us of the bizarre odyssey that some of our earnings will make, via Holland, Panama and Switzerland. Denis speaks of all this with the zeal of a fiendishly clever scientist who cannot help but be light years ahead of governments and bureaucracy and officialdom.

  Not that Denis is sensational
as he tells us of this wonderland of vastly-increased wealth. He is dependable Denis – with his reassuring eyes, balding, domed head and affectionate bear-like presence. But occasionally John and I have to laugh when he strays into the satirisable. He talks of a company called Ganga Distributors: ‘An old-established company – a company which we have representatives with … and … and I would gladly let the world know that.’

  When we re-emerge into the dwindling sunlight around the pool at 5.30 this afternoon, we have all become accomplices in something most of us don’t understand.

  Terry J and I bathe in a brisk, bracing, choppy sea below Henry Luce’s house. There’s a fine sunset.

  Drinks are a little quieter. After dinner there is Calvados, but no sing-a-579

  long. Terry J becomes voluble over politics, over progress and the lack of it since the fourteenth century, and Denis joins the rest of us, until he receives a quite gratuitously shrill attack from TJ during the ‘debate’. Denis’ eyes momentarily widened, as if to say ‘Is he often like this?’

  Wednesday, September 19th, Fisher’s Island

  Last run. This time 45 minutes non-stop with sprints. The island seems empty. I frighten hen pheasants, rabbits, crows and water rats as I pad by. The sun warms me and when I get back to White Caps there’s only Brian, the major-domo, around. Bathe, then luxuriate in the Jacuzzi.

  As if a symbol of our new life under O’Brien, we leave the States majestically. Fresh and tingling from the massage pool, we’re served fresh fruit and coffee breakfast, then a helicopter lifts us off from outside the front door, heads us over Long Island, passing over and around Sag in which I was running a little over a month ago, along the sun-filled shoreline into JFK, where a coach transfers us to the Concorde lounge, then across to darkening London in three hours, sixteen minutes.

  Sunday, September 23rd

  Terry G comes round in the evening and gives me the first ‘unofficial’ inkling of Brian’s progress in the States. Apparently one and a half million dollars were taken in the first couple of days (Thursday/Friday) and Warner’s are now looking beyond a $25 million gross.

  Rain comes down from heavy, darkening skies as I sit in my work-room talking with TG about his future plans – Brazil or Theseus.

  Apparently John Calley liked Jabberwocky. TG is caught. He has stated that he will and must do his own movie in the next two years. He only wants to do animation and a bit of performing for Python. Can he do both and resist Eric’s suggestion that he alone should direct Python 4?

  Tuesday, September 23th

  Yesterday morning I began my new ‘finish the play’ schedule. Up in my work-room by nine o’clock. Unplug the phone and concentrate solely on the play until one.

  Good progress yesterday and today. It’s taking a more serious turn, which I’m happy with.

  Wednesday, September 26th

  Morning’s work curtailed in order to get to Shepperton for a board meeting. Arrive there soon after 1.30. All sorts of men in green tights with leafy costumes and panto-style helmets wandering about. A group of dwarfs, smoking. Charles Gregson is about the first person I see in modern dress. Flash Gordon is filming crowd scenes today.

  I am extremely happy that we choose Hall Ellison as the best of the three catering bids. They are independent. The other two are subsidiaries, of Trust House Forte in one case, and Grand Met in the other.

  Both THF and Grand Met emphasise economy, cost-effectiveness and profit maximisation and hardly mention food at all. Hall Ellison propose to pay their chef a weekly salary of £115.00 and their manager £120.00. THF would pay the chef £75.00 and the manager £134.00.

  To Methuen for a preliminary meeting on the launch of Monty Python’s Scrap Book on November 15th. So good to be amongst publishers who actually sell books. I feel very well-disposed towards Geoffrey, Jan H and David Ross. They’ve stood by us well. Geoffrey gives TJ and me a copy each of a new edition of Noël Coward’s plays, because one of the plays in the collection was said to have had its first performance at Oflag VIIB and lists the POWs who made up the cast.

  Thursday, September 27th

  Talk to Denis O’B after breakfast. He says he’s almost ‘too embarrassed’ to talk about Brian figures, but on the first three days of our ‘break’ in the US (this is film-man’s jargon for first nationwide exposure), we have broken nine house records and done 250% better business than Warner’s next best this summer – The In-Laws. He confirms the figure of one and a half million dollars taken in the first three days in 120 cinemas.

  Work on with the play – keeping my feet on the ground until 2.30-ish.

  At four down to Donovan’s for a check-up and I record him doing a radio commercial for Brian – ‘Hello, I’m Michael Palin’s dentist’ – to the effect that Michael requires all the money he can get to pay for expensive dental treatment. This is an extension of the ‘interviews with our mothers’ idea, which has produced at least one gem – from John’s mother, in which she shows immaculate comic timing in pleading for money to keep her in her old age.

  Friday, September 28th

  Variety calls Brian variously ‘Swell’, ‘Fat’, ‘Potent’, ‘Brawny’, ‘Loud’, ‘Smash’, ‘Booming’ and ‘Hot’ – and it looks like the biggest-grossing film in the US this last week in September.

  Visit Euro Atlantic in mid-afternoon. I meet Mark de Veré Nicholl, Philip McDanell (frighteningly young, like an elder brother of Tom) and others of benign Denis’s rather Kensingtonian staff. The offices and the building in Cadogan Square are clean-limbed, neat, elegant and cool without forcing any effect of dynamism or modernity.

  Denis talks first of Jabberwocky, which both he and Calley feel is a small masterpiece. Denis feels bound to ask me why Terry G, after proving his directorial ability so clearly in Jabberwocky, didn’t get to handle Life of Brian. So I try to fill him in on a little Python folklore.

  From Denis’ I drive to Shepherd’s Bush to John Jarvis’ cutting rooms, where JC is on the final stages of preparation of the Pythonised travelogue1

  which will make up the complete all-Python bill when the Life of Brian opens in London.

  John is in his element with the slowly building rant, which he can take to hysteria and beyond like no-one else I know. Suggest a couple of cuts which he seems happy with.

  Wednesday, October 3rd

  Python’s Life of Brian has made No. 1 on the latest Variety chart. One year to the day since we were packed in a tiny upper room of the Ribat in Monastir, ours is the film most people in America want to see.

  Maybe subconsciously this reassuring state of affairs propels me to the end of the second act of my play.

  Thursday, October 4th

  Out in the evening with Denis O’B, Inge and John Calley, who is in town for a couple of days.

  Calley asked a few leading questions of the ‘what next for you?’ variety as we ate in the cosily sumptuous surroundings of Walton’s restaurant. Denis steered him towards the ‘Roger of the Raj’ Ripping Yarn and I told Calley of my fondness for Indian subjects – and the British in India – eccentricity developing there quite splendidly. He seemed very keen for me to do a Ripping Yarn movie, which was nice.

  But he was tired and popped into his waiting Rolls after the meal.

  Friday, October 3th

  Talked to Denis in the morning. He said that John Calley had called him before leaving Heathrow to tell me or any other Python that any recce to India would be paid for by Warner Brothers.

  Saturday, October 6th

  Drop in on George at Friar Park. He’s about to have his breakfast (onions, egg and peppers (green)). I apologise for arriving too early, but George (half-way into a new beard) assures me that he’s been up a while, and out planting his fritillaries.

  He takes the gardening very seriously and has a bulb catalogue, which he refers to now and then in between telling me of the $200 million suit the Beatles are bringing against the management of Beatlemania, a live show in the US using their look-alikes.
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  He hasn’t heard that Brian is No. 1, but is greatly chuffed at the news and shakes my hand.

  ‘Now you can all have one of these,’ says George, nodding round at Friar Park.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I have to say, ‘I’m really happy where I am.’

  ‘Nonsense, Palin,’ replies the Quiet One, ‘you’ll have a mansion and like it!’

  I enjoy George’s company and I think he mine. Despite all his trappings he’s a down-to-earth, easy-to-please character.

  Have promised to take Tom and some friends on a pre-eleventh-birthday treat. We drive down to South Ken and visit the Science, Geology and Natural History Museum (which has a worthy ecology exhibition) and then to Wolfe’s in Park Lane for highly expensive hamburgers. The children delight in telling me in large stage whispers how pricey everything is … ‘Cor! Coca-Cola 50p!’ ‘You can get a can in the shops …’ and so on. It’s like the Young Consumers’ Club.

  Sunday, October 7th

  Into the sixth week of dry, warm and sunny weather. I am much lifted by the Sunday press previews of the new Ripping Yarns. All papers carry extensive details and are uniformly glad to see the series back. ‘Topping treat of the season so far’ says Purser, and The Observer are very nice. All helps to counter Time Out’s ‘return of this desperately disappointing series’.

  Feel tired, but rally to take the family down to Dulwich. Family lunch with all the Herberts (Jeremy just about to go up to York University for first term). Conker hunting along past Dulwich Picture Gallery in the afternoon.

  Monday, October 8th

  Begin work on the third act of the play. I feel committed to it now and am writing eagerly and easily – as if I’m now warmed-up, loosened up to the task and the end is in sight. I think I might actually make the self-imposed deadline of the end of October.