Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (17 page)

I cannot understand a word that’s being sung throughout the hour, but it’s evidently to do with revenge, blindness, the gods and other gloomy Nordic specialities. Not a laugh in it. The orchestra is good, but the church swallows up voices and makes it very difficult to stage.

Very effective integration of pebble-banging – with the ‘pebble-choir’ ringing the church behind the audience and setting up a wave of staccato sound which had the effect of swirling stereophonic sound.

Home to hear from Howard Goldberg that he had loved my piece for the
NYT
on Prince Charles and was planning to run it on Sunday. He
kept going into fits of giggles over the phone whilst checking spellings, etc. Most encouraging.

Estimated by lunchtime – and ten mornings’ work – that I have 20 minutes of good material to start
The Missionary
, and another five or six quite strong.

Driven out to Friar Park in stately fashion in the back of Ray Cooper’s elegant and comfortable 26-year-old Bentley – all wooden panelling and a good smell of leather.

On the way Ray tells me that George had a phone call two weeks ago from some anonymous American telling George he had a gun and an air ticket to England. It all sounded like a horrible hoax, but the FBI found that a man in Baltimore had been seen in a bar making just such threats and bragging about his air ticket. George H’s place was ringed by police for a week – and he had a bodyguard with him at all times. Considering all this, George met us in very relaxed style. He was up on the slopes of his Matterhorn, with the builders who are busy restoring this fine piece of eccentric garden landscaping.

Willy and I drive off to go to see Wednesday play at [Leyton] Orient.

It’s a warm day, the ground at Brisbane Road is small, neat and feels far more of a local family atmosphere than any others we’ve been to this season.

It seems that a Wednesday goal has to come, but instead a scuffle at the far end and Orient have scored on one of their rare visits to the Wednesday area.

This stings Wednesday – crowd and players – into some strong retaliatory measures, but within minutes Orient have scored again and it’s over – as is probably Wednesday’s chance for promotion.

A satisfying incident as we walk to the car. In the long line of cars moving up to the main road are three lads, one of whom leans out of the window and shouts in delight at me … ‘Heh! It’s Eric Idle!’ I smile, but
weakly, I expect, and walk on as they noisily discuss who I’m not.

About 15 yards further on their car approaches and they pass up the road with a chant of ‘We know who you are!’ This is followed almost immediately by a crunch of colliding metal and a crackle of shattering tail-light as their car thuds into the one in front and pushes that one into the one in front of him.

Drive down to the first of a week’s Python meetings at 2 Park Square West.

We appear to be very much in accord over our exasperation, frustration and consternation about Denis’s role in our affairs. In Anne’s painstakingly-assembled report on life with EuroAtlantic, she suggested that she and Steve [Abbott] could run our day-to-day affairs from 2 PSW.

A remarkable degree of unanimity within the group that now is the time to sort out this whole question.

To dinner with Clare [Latimer]
³⁷
. Excellent food, plenty of drink and jolly company. A vicar from St John’s Wood who tells me he took 50 of his most fervent worshippers to see
Life of Brian
last Good Friday – instead of moping about church ‘mourning’.

A dry, warm day with soft, high cloud. Everyone in a good mood. Eric suggests we all of us make a list of the pros and cons of DO’B. The lists turn out to be remarkably similar. Tax planning and tax structures are commended, but all the pro lists are much shorter than the cons – which include over-secrecy, inability to listen to or understand things he doesn’t want to hear, and use of word ‘philosophy’.

At lunch – Anne makes us delicious asparagus tart – we get fairly silly. Decide that the Pythons should purchase our own nuclear deterrent. We put a small ad in
The Times
– ‘Nuclear Missile wanted, with warhead, London area’.

Denis is pleased that we have decided to go ahead with theatrical release of
Hollywood Bowl
. Which we now decide to call, simply,
Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl
. But try as we can to drill into him that he should go for smaller distributors with more time to listen, the more Denis retreats back to the majors whom he knows.

He claims that the small distributors only handle ‘exploitation’ pics (violent or sexy or blatantly both, which are so bad that money is only made by a quick, sharp killing in selected theatres). His feeling is that all distributors are idiots, but he will try and find us the most benevolent idiot.

Denis calls me. He asks me to try and patch up the Gilliam/Harrison relationship. Not that TG has done any more than express reservations about George’s music, and the last song in particular, but GH has taken it badly and feels that he no longer cares – and if TG wants to write the music he can write it himself.

I try to defend TG’s position by saying that the use of GH’s music was rather forced on him. Denis returns to the financial argument (does Terry realise how much money the film is costing?) which is slightly unfair. Anyway, as Denis memorably puts it, ‘You just don’t treat Beatles this way.’

Collect Rachel from school, then ring George. He isn’t angry in the conventional sense – I mean, no shouting or swearing – but he just is sad and a bit fed up. ‘I was just a fan,’ he puts it, ‘who wanted to help you do things because I liked what you all did.’

But after all this comes out, we get down to discussing the end song. I tell him we both like it musically, but we’ve now got some new lyrics which change only the verses. Let him listen to them and sling them out if he doesn’t like them. But of course he does quite like them – and is happy to do them and will send a demo later in the week. I hope all is healed, temporarily at least.

Dash off to the Python meeting.

It’s quite obvious that the group as a whole trust Anne more than Denis (JC wanted it to go on record that he mistrusted Denis less than the rest of us) and Eric was the only one who signed the letter to Denis with his surname. ‘Denis is the sort of person I want to be on surname terms with,’ was the way he put it – and I promised to write that in my diary.

To Eric’s by car about seven o’clock. He has now assembled enough material for six TV programmes to be made by his company – Rutland Weekend Television – and sold to England, the US, Australia, Canada, etc. They’re comedy sketch shows, basically – with music animation special effects and all set in the legendary Rutland Isles, where anything can happen.

Anyway, Eric wants me to come and play one of the three stars, along with himself and possibly Carrie Fisher. Filming would, he thinks, not take more than eight weeks and would be done in the winter on a lovely tropical island.

I’m drawn by the immediacy of doing a TV series on video and by Eric’s unportentous, let’s-just-get-on-with-it attitude and refusal to treat it as the most important thing ever. But it’s a month, at least, accounted for and at that time I may be in pre-production of
The Missionary
.

Family outing to
Popeye
.
³⁸
We ate excellent hamburgers in Covent Garden and the sun came out and shone on us as we walked through the Garden, past the escapologist, through St Paul’s churchyard, where trees have been planted in memory of actors buried there. One rather undernourished little shrub was ironically plaqued ‘In memory of Hattie Jacques’.

Home to hear that there was burning and looting going on in Brixton as we had wandered through the quiet bustle of the West End on this sunny Saturday afternoon.

Help prepare for dinner with Steve Abbott and friend Laurie.

Part of my reason for asking him round is to find out more about his feelings about Denis and Euro. Basically he is concerned about divided loyalties. He cannot carry on working for the Pythons and doing what is best for the Pythons within the EuroAtlantic framework because he feels the decisions taken for the benefit of EuroAtlantic are very often contrary to the benefit of the Pythons.

Both Steve and Laurie are politically to the left, Laurie enough to have changed her bank account from Barclays (naughty South African connections) to the Co-op. Only to find that the Co-op use Barclays as their clearing bank!

Steve is I think a man of good, basic, honest convictions and if for this reason he’s leaving EuroAtlantic, it makes me listen very carefully.

Dry and cool. Drive down to Crawford Street to have hair cut by Don [Abaka, our family hairdresser for many years]. We talk about the Brixton riot and that Don who is, I should imagine, a very easy-going and law-abiding black – a part of the establishment if you like – still can say, as if a little surprised, ‘I’ve not been in any trouble with the police, but I really feel worried sometimes that if there’s trouble in a street they’ll pick me out.’

Home to work on
The Missionary
, but for some reason, as the clouds clear and the sun shines from a blue sky, I find myself surrendering to the pleasantness of the day. Sit in the garden seat in the sun and read Bernard Levin’s infectious raves about three of his favourite restaurants in Switzerland. Makes my mind drift to thoughts of holidays and sun-soaked balconies in small French towns and poplars motionless above sparkling streams and good wine and company and celebrating.

Watch the space shuttle land most skilfully. Feel, more than I ever did with the moonwalks, that the success of this first reusable spacecraft is the real start of what an American astronaut rather chillingly called ‘the exploitation of space’.

Hardly see Helen, on this our 15th wedding anniversary morning. Am woken by Rachel at a quarter to seven, standing by my bedside, dressed and ready to go. She wakes William by tickling his feet (the only way, he claims, he can be woken up) and the three of us make for the quarter to nine North London Line train to Broad Street.

Uneventful journey to Darsham, though we found ourselves in the breakfast car next to an assured, rich-voiced, late middle-aged Englishman with half-moon glasses, sitting with a fortyish, mousy-blonde lady, with the large, bony, open features of an English upper-class gel.

He began to make notes about some speech he was to make … ‘The recent clashes in Brixton, foreseen by Mr Enoch Powell over fifteen years ago -’ His eligible companion interrupts … ‘“Clashes”? Do you think “clashes” is a strong enough word?’ ‘No, no, perhaps you’re right … Battle? … Mm …’.

We left them, still composing, at Ipswich. Met by Mother at Darsham. She looked a little wearier than of late and drives a little slower and a little nearer the centre of the road.

In the afternoon I read through Robert H’s manuscript of the Python censorship book, which he wants me to check before I go to Crete. It’s well-researched, thorough, lightly, but not uncritically, biased in our favour. The word I’ve written in my notes to sum up his endeavour is ‘scrupulous’. Unsensational in presentation, but not necessarily in concept – it’s really everything I hoped it would be.

Over lunch spend a couple of hours with Steve talking about EuroAtlantic, my finances and the possible transfer of our immediate financial affairs to a Steve and Anne-run office.

Steve reveals fresh facets of his straightforward, unassuming but very independent nature. He declines a coffee because it’s the Passover and he’s eating only Kosher food for a week. He almost apologetically explains that he’s not even a born Jew. He just began to take an interest four or five years ago, learnt Hebrew and another Judaic language and set himself
certain standards of observation which he readily admits are somewhat inconsistent, but one of them is to eat nothing but Kosher food throughout the Passover period.

Drive down to Hampshire for the Python weekend. Collect Gilliam at 7.45, then Eric at eight and, despite some build-up of holiday weekend traffic, we are driving through the New Forest by half past nine and to the hotel, set in a rather nondescript conurbation near New Milton.

The Chewton Glen Hotel is unashamedly expensive – a soft, enveloping atmosphere of thick carpets, armchairs, soft voices, chandeliers. From the BMWs and Jaguars in the car park to the miniature of sherry with the manager’s compliments, everything reflects money. Like a padded cell for the very rich. But it suits our purposes – we’re here, after all, to concentrate our minds on one of the most important decisions Python has yet made.

There is remarkably little dissension from JC’s opening assessment that we should tell Denis that we no longer feel we need a manager. That there should, in the interests of economy and efficiency, be one Python office to administrate the companies, and that future relationships with Denis should be on an ad hoc basis.

Within a couple of hours we’ve reached a heartening degree of agreement and JC is left to compose a letter. I go to the billiard room with TG for a game on a marvellous full-size table. The balls feel like lead weights after the half-size table at home. Then to lunch. The food is good – delicate and lots of things like lobster and snails and shallots.