Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (18 page)

Then a game of snooker, a game of squash with Terry J and back for more snooker and dinner. Quite like old times, with Graham leaving early to go to a gay club in Bournemouth (for the second night running, I’m told) – but even better than the old days because GC doesn’t get pissed and can drive himself.

Talk, over the champagne and cream of Jerusalem artichoke soup, of Bobby Sands and his hunger strike. Eric and John think it’s something you should be able to laugh at – and they do. TJ, and I agree with him, feels that the laughter must come from recognising and sensing a basic truth in what you’re laughing at and you can’t laugh at something you feel is dishonest – and I think it’s dishonest to think of Sands as a worthless villain. And dangerous too.

To bed before midnight. How easily the ‘historic’ decision has been made. It’s not often Python so clearly and unanimously sees the rightness of a decision and it’s such a relief that it’s happened like that today. It now remains to be seen how DO’B reacts. I hope he will not see it as a stab in the back, but a stab in the front. He should have seen it coming and it shouldn’t prove fatal.

At eight, feeling good and refreshed and bright, I walk down the drive of the Chewton Glen, taking care not to trip over the floodlighting bar which points up at the pine trees, and, taking the sign for Barton-on-Sea, make for the English Channel cliffs.

I can see the Isle of Wight in the distance. It’s a dull morning with the sun only a faint lemon glow in a thickly-padded off-white sky. There are women walking poodles called Pippa and empty seaside hotels and a ravaged and collapsing shoreline which has no drama, excitement or visual splendour. Gardening and Walking the Dog Land 1981.

We assemble about 10.15. There’s a re-reading of the letter to Denis and some corrections made. JC is so anxious to emphasise our inconstancy that there’s a danger the cold reality of the message may not get through.

Then follows a chat about the next film – and one of the remarkable displays of the collective Python mind doing what it does best, best. Ideas, jokes, themes pour out from everyone round the table so fast that no-one wants to stop and write any of them down for fear of losing this glorious impetus. The court framework for the next movie comes up – the idea of us all being hanged for producing a film that is only a tax-dodge. It’s all rich and funny and complex and very satisfying.

Starts well, my 38th, with a clear and cloudless morning – the sort of day May ought to be, but hasn’t been so far.

Work on the script – slowly but surely. Anne comes round at lunchtime with the letter to Denis to sign. JC has put back some of the wordiness that Eric and I took out, but it seems to be clear and bending over backwards to give us the blame!

I hear Denis will not be back until the weekend and wants a meeting
with us next Monday. There’s a sort of inexorability about it, like watching someone walk very, very slowly towards a concealed hole you’ve dug.

First thing this morning, am putting out milk bottles when I encounter Peggy from No. 1 Julia Street. She’s very sad because a week ago her case against her landlords was dismissed. She’s got to move and No. 1 will be sold. Ring Steve and instruct him to try and buy it for me.

My
New Yorker
piece on Cinderella comes back with a rejection. Like A Coren’s rejection note from
Punch
some years ago, the worst thing is the profuse apology – almost tangible embarrassment of the contact at the magazine. He’s right, of course. He likes the incidental jokes which I like best and feels the whole a little too dull and conventional. A warning sign for all my writing.

My Bratby portrait has arrived. I hang it, not altogether seriously, but mainly to frighten Helen, above the piano. I don’t like his interpretation of me particularly, but his technique of thick oil paint applied with short knife strokes in dozens of colours does make the picture very exciting. It certainly stands out, as an original should, in our houseful of rather restrained repros and prints. Quite ebullient and bright.

Despite many comings and goings in the house (window cleaners to give estimates, recently-robbed neighbours to look at our burglar alarm system), I have the best writing morning of a bad week.

I write a sequence this morning that I know will be funny (the lost butler) and at least breaks a week in the wilderness.

Looking forward to a lazy evening in, when Denis rings. He’s back and he has evidently seen the Chewton Glen letter.

He sounded calm, and in a realistic frame of mind. He was not entirely clear about what the letter proposed – could I elucidate? I elucidated as best I could, with kids clamouring for supper and Helen washing up beside me. We wanted DO’B to be an ad hoc, independent figure who
we could come to for the major things he’d proved himself good at. Our essential aim was to simplify our business affairs.

DO’B was silent for a moment, but seemed to accept all this.

He talked about his ‘upside’ and his ‘downside’ and rather lost me here, but the long and the short of the call was that we should have a meeting as quickly as possible – and it needn’t be a long one, he said. I promised I would ring Anne and ask her to set one up for Monday. Throughout Denis’s tone was only a little injured and defensive and mainly practical and realistic – and quite friendly.

I talk to Eric later. He sounds unhelpful over the DO’B situation. He doesn’t want to meet him and absolutely refuses to give DO’B any sort of preferential option on the next film at this stage. I bit my lip, and nearly my desk as well, at this.

I drove down to BUPA to present Dr Gilkes with a long-running Palin saga – the Great Verruca, or Corn, as it once was.

He examined it and, as it has changed its shape and become less spread out, with more of a peak on it, he reckoned he could cut it out. And without much more ado, this is what he did. Using an instantaneously-acting local anaesthetic, he cut and chopped and sliced – sometimes with such great effort that I could scarcely believe it was my little toe and not some thick oak tree he was working on. Then he cauterised the edges, bandaged it all up and I hobbled out. But at least my verruca, which has been with me for nearly two years, was now in the dustbin.

I’d made Gilkes happy – ‘It’s been a jolly good day for the knife,’ he assured me when we’d agreed on surgery. ‘Some days I hardly use it at all,’ he added regretfully.

I was to go straight from my verruca operation to a meeting with Denis O’B. It all seemed rather symbolic.

I hobbled in, the last to arrive (apart from Eric, who was just then landing in New York). Anne had thoughtfully provided white wine and some canapes. Denis sat looking a little careworn, but raised a smile. He had a notepad full of appointments and projects which he flipped through – films he was hoping to bring in through HandMade Distributors.

At about 7.20, after we’d been talking for an hour, John had to leave because he was taking someone to the theatre. So it was left to the four
of us to decide on the next move with Denis. If we wanted to terminate – as ‘I think the letter says’ – Denis wanted to do it as quickly as possible.

Was there an alternative to complete and final termination? Terry J asked. Some way in which he could run a financial structure with us and liaise with the office at Park Square West? Denis didn’t like this. It was all or nothing. He wanted to be free to concentrate on all the other areas EuroAtlantic could go in. He might, he said, get out of films altogether.

Graham asked if there were any ‘offshore structure’ which could be kept going. No, again Denis was adamant. Steve could not run a structure such as the one Denis had set up and which he still today talked about with loving pride.

So at about eight o’clock, as a dull evening was drawing to a close outside, we had to take a decision. Should we terminate? It really was the only answer. It was what the letter, signed by us all on May 5th, had said anyway. And so it was agreed and Denis left to begin to take down the structure and prepare for us a list of proposals for the ending of our relationship.

I couldn’t believe it. My verruca and manager out, all within four hours.

Manage the first full morning’s writing this week and feel much better for it. Recently-gouged right toe is preventing me from running, so after lunch go down to Beatties and buy some LNER ’30’s imported teak rolling stock with the ten quid Ma gave me for my 38th. It crosses my mind that I’m 38 and still sneaking off to toyshops.

Down to Camberwell for dinner with the Joneses and, as it turns out, a rather boozed Richard Boston.
³⁹

He really doesn’t look in good shape, which is a pity as he’s such a mine of wondrous information – and knows such gems of political history as the fact that a gorilla once raped a French president’s wife in the Elysée Palace, which is, of course, next to the zoo, and for many years afterwards the president was paranoid about gorillas.

And all this on the night the Pope was shot and Tom helped William
Ellis swim to a 20 point victory in the schools swimming gala. And another hunger striker died in the Maze.

Angela and I head for Linton – our great-grandfather’s parish from 1865 to 1904. I’m intrigued by Edward Palin – the man of great promise who in his early 30’s was senior tutor and bursar of St John’s College, Oxford, and who gave up the chance of great things to marry Brita, an Irish orphan girl – herself the subject of a great rags-to-riches story – and settle at this tiny Herefordshire village and raise seven children.

There is the grave in the churchyard where he is buried together with two of his sons who pre-deceased him – one who died at Shrewsbury aged 18, another killed in the trenches of the Somme. Next to his grave and upstaging it is the grave of Caroline Watson, the American who found Brita the orphan and brought her up.

Determined, as a result of this weekend trip, to follow up some leads on the Palins – St John’s College being one of them.

This is the day appointed for the changeover of Python affairs from EuroAtlantic at 26 Cadogan Square back to the more leisurely Nash terraces of Regent’s Park. From today Steve and Lena [Granstedt, his assistant] work for Python and not EA.

I remember my embarrassment at having to tell people Python was with EuroAtlantic Ltd – an ugly name really, but I have had very good service from them. I rang Corinna [Soar – EA Company Secretary] – she was very touched by my letter and we had a quite unrecriminatory chat. She says it will be better when the changeover has actually happened. It’s the transition process that’s painful. I want to say to her how concerned I am about our future – that we don’t see our move as a solution, just an inevitable part of the continuing development of Python, but I can’t get into all that. I suggest we have lunch. Coward.

Drive down to Wardour Street for a
Time Bandits
viewing.

George’s single is No. 14 in the US charts and now he’s under pressure
to release follow-up singles – and we’re under pressure to put another George song at the top of
Time Bandits
, as a potential US single. George admits with a smile that ‘You grumble at them (the public) like hell when you’re
not
in the charts, and then when you are in the charts you grumble at them for putting you there for the wrong reasons’ (the aftermath of the Lennon shooting).

I don’t like these viewings, especially when I know the room is full of people who have tried desperately to have many sections of the film cut. For the first half-hour everything seems wrong.

The laughs come for the first time on Cleese’s ‘Robin Hood’ scene. From then on the ‘audience’ loosens up and I relax and George’s big, bright arrangement of ‘Oh Rye In Aye Ay’ caps the film perfectly. At least we can talk to each other at the end. Even George, a harsh critic up to now, thinks the film is almost there, but hates the opening credits.

I must say, after today, I have a chilling feeling that we have fallen between too many stools. Not enough sustained comedy for the Python audience to be satisfied and too much adult content (‘Titanic’ references, etc) for the children’s audience. We could just have created a dodo.

Helen comes up to tell me that a ‘For Sale’ board is going up on No. 1 Julia Street. Steve A contacts Stickley and Kent, the agents. They are asking £37,500. Steve says he will get the keys.

Look at 1 Julia Street with Steve (financial) and Edward [Burd] (architectural). Damp, crumbling and filthy inside. Steve cannot believe that people were living here only a week ago and can believe even less that anyone should hope to get £37,500 for it. Edward thinks that the external walls, beneath their cracked and powdery rendering, may be stronger than they look. He reckons it would cost £30-£36,000 to renovate, and if we were able to buy the place for £25,000, despite its present state of extreme decay, it would be good value. Ed is going to find out more about the agent’s hopes for the house and Steve says he can’t wait to start working out how best we can pay for it!

Steve’s business sense is as eager as Denis’s, but his style utterly different. Denis is real estate and yachts, Steve is going to the March for Jobs rally at the weekend, three-day cricket and Springsteen.

Watch a clean, efficient, rather soporific goalless draw between Wales and Russia. It does one’s perceptions good every now and then to see Russia – the enemy, the nation whose existence justifies enormous expenditure by Estaings, Thatchers, Carters and Reagans on weapons of destruction, the iron threat to Poland and Afghanistan, the home of Philbys and Burgesses, the cruel oppressor of Jewish minorities and cultural dissidents – playing a World Cup game at Wrexham.