Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (22 page)

To the Escargot in Greek Street for meal with Terry and Al. Terry has just returned from his
Fairy Tales
promotion trip to Birmingham (which he hated) and Manchester (which he found well-heeled) and Liverpool (sad tales of the decline of the Adelphi).
⁴⁶
Give the manager one of my complimentary tickets to Mel Brooks’s
History of the World
, which is having a glossy preview at 11.30.

Find myself sitting next to Harold Evans, Editor of the
Times
. He seems to be very anxious to please – asking me what I’m doing, as if he knows me. Make some jokes about the SDP, then he admits that he does think they are a very sensible lot. This, together with a propensity to do the right thing by clapping whenever Mel Brooks appears on screen, makes me suspect him. Surely
Times
editors should be made of harder stuff?

The film is dreadful. Having dispensed early on with any claim to historical accuracy or authenticity and any exceptional attention to visual detail, the whole thing depends on the quality of the gags. And the quality is poor. It’s like a huge, expensive, grotesquely-inflated stand-up act. A night club act with elephantiasis.

Tom becomes a teenager. Just writing those words makes me abruptly aware of time passing. He has lots of books about aircraft and Helen
and I are to buy him a new clarinet. He goes off to school very happy.

I take him and three friends out to Century City in Mayfair – a new hamburger place, all silver-sprayed ‘hi-tech’ décor. Only open three weeks, but looking decidedly run down. Still, the food was good and we all sat inside a dome painted silver. At one point Alex Robertson declares, almost proudly, ‘Gosh, my mum and dad wouldn’t have been able to afford
this
.’ Echoes from all round the table.

Buy presents for the evening’s celebrations to mark EuroAtlantic’s tenth anniversary. The celebration is to be held, somehow appropriately, aboard a boat called the Silver Barracuda.

Mark Vere Nicoll [EuroAtlantic’s legal wiz] makes a speech and presents Denis with a leather-covered photo album which is also a music box. Denis gives a long speech in reply. Quite fluent and informal. But he does at one point pay tribute to Peter Sellers – adding, somewhat unnecessarily, ‘Who can’t be with us tonight.’ George, ever in touch with the other world, shouts back, ‘Don’t be so sure, Denis.’

Helen is 39. But looks a lot younger.

Mary, Edward and Catherine Gib arrive at 8.00 and I take them all out for what turns out to be a very successful Mystery Evening. First to the Gay Hussar – good food and efficient, old-fashioned service. Then on to Ronnie Scott’s to see Panama Francis and the Savoy Sultans – a Harlem Thirties jazz and swing band. Beautiful to listen to, presented stylishly and with the added poignancy that they are a dying breed. In ten years many of them won’t be left. But the two hours we spent there in their soothing, infectious company were rare magic.

Just after five o’clock I suddenly found myself at the end of
The Missionary
rewrites.

I’ve spent about five and a half solid working weeks on the rewrite and there are only about a dozen pages left intact from the 121-page first
version. So I have virtually written a second film in about half the time it took to write the first.

But for the moment, at the end of this crisp and invigorating day, the feeling is just one of an onrush of freedom – of time to spare – the emergence from isolation.

We landed at Cork at ten o’clock, our VW minibus was waiting and we drove without incident to Ballymaloe. The bright sunshine of London was replaced by rain in Ireland. By early evening it’s clear enough for me to go for a run – up past barking dogs and along a narrow road which grows more and more wild and directionless – giving rise in the dark corners of my mind to California-like fears of sudden mindless violence. (I was not to know that about one hour before, in the London we had just left, a bomb had exploded in a Wimpy bar in Oxford Street
⁴⁷
– the IRA claimed credit.)

Woke about 8.00 to hear Rachel colouring industriously across the other side of the room. Then to breakfast – which now stretches from nine till ten. I love our little tableful and it’s a joy and complete relaxation to sit, after children have gone, with a dependably tasty cup of coffee and gaze out of the long Georgian windows at the damp autumn countryside.

We have a packed lunch today and, on advice from an Irishman staying here, drive to Cobh and Fota Island.

Cobh, an old fishing town and fadedly elegant resort, is approached across a causeway, past an old blockhouse or pill-box on which are daubed the words ‘Cobh supports the hunger strikers’. Then there are a number of small black flags on short makeshift flagpoles nailed up to telegraph poles.

Unlike anywhere else we’ve been in Southern Ireland, this year or last, there is a definite frisson of hostility in Cobh. It’s clearly official municipal policy to support the IRA – although these initials are never mentioned. It’s always ‘our boys’ or ‘our countrymen’. Beside the station, now a fish-unloading yard, posters are stuck on the wall – clenched fists surmounted
with the words ‘Stand Up To Britain’ and an incongruous picture of Maggie Thatcher with the words beneath ‘Wanted. For The Torture Of Irish Prisoners’.

The memorial to those who died in the Lusitania has been turned into an IRA memorial, with placards hung round the necks of the 1915 sailors giving the names of the hunger strikers. Like so much in Ireland it is a rough and ready gesture – there’s no style or care particularly taken. It’s functional, rather ugly and very depressing.

Mary [Burd] gets fish lobbed in her direction by the unloaders and there’s some laughing and sending-up. My final image of this potentially rather attractive Georgian town is of a grimy 40-foot trailer being driven at violent, shaking speed along crowded streets, blood pouring out of the back and onto the road.

The car horns start to blare and I know I’m in Manhattan [for the opening of
Time Bandits
]. A fine 27th storey view out over Central Park. The trees in full autumn colours, mustards, russets, yellows. Very fine, a stretch of calm on this restless island.

General atmosphere of cautious excitement improved by continuing news of fresh enthusiastic reviews. Jack Lyons [Avco-Embassy’s publicity man] says he has nearly all the majors covered, but so far his spies in the
NY Times
have not been any help with leaks about the Canby review.
⁴⁸
Canby’s review will be out on Friday, but, if all else fails, Jack says he’ll get a leak from one of the compositors on Thursday afternoon!

In the evening we have a Gala Premiere and I drink an awful lot of champagne. Jack has arranged for me to escort Eleanor Mondale, a rather classically good-looking 21-year-old blonde, who resembles, especially, with her hair-do and use of knickerbockers, a chunky Princess Diana.
⁴⁹
She is quite used to the bright lights and walks with a serene sort of Scandinavian poise through all the ballyhoo. And there
is
ballyhoo.

We are driven to the theatre in limousines and disgorged before a small waiting crowd gathered good-humouredly rather than ecstatically behind
wooden barriers. Then we go inside and meet the good people who have been invited along. Meet Frank Capra Jnr, the new head of Avco-Embassy, whom I quite like. James Taylor, looking like the earnest maths master in a prep school, comes up and re-introduces himself.

After the movie begins, Terry G, Nancy, Eleanor Mondale and I take off to a ceilinged, fashionable but un-chic restaurant down on 18th called Joanne’s. Shelley [Duvall] joins us later with news of a complete fiasco at the Gala Premiere. It was held in a twin cinema complex and apparently the sound was very bad in the first one for ten minutes, and in the second the picture came on upside down after the first couple of reels.

Driven by a talkative chauffeur – they don’t call them chauffeurs over here, I notice, but ‘drivers’. This one goes into a monologue about ‘celebrities’. ‘I do like celebrities. They’re very nice people.’ He tells me how, as a cabbie, he gave a ride to Frank Sinatra and then rushed home and rang his mother at three in the morning to tell her the news. He also has taken Gilda Radner to the dentist and tells me all sorts of intimate details about her bridge work.

I notice that the driver is totally grey – cap, trousers, jacket, shoes, hair and face. Amazing. To the mid-West Side in sight of the big liner bays, for the
Dick Cavett Show
.

The programme progresses in uneasy fencing between comedy and seriousness. Cavett doesn’t want to look like the dullard, so he indulges my subversive silliness instead of bringing it under a tight rein. The result is that some comedy works and there is nothing to fall back on when it doesn’t.

The limousine takes us on to NBC and the
Robert Klein Hour
. This is a radio show I have come to enjoy greatly. Klein is relaxed, sharp, funny and good at guiding a disparate guest list – which includes Meat Loaf and Loudon Wainwright III – who remembers straight away that we met last in a massage parlour.

End up eating at Elaine’s. Shelley is along with us for a while. Good Italian food, nice busy atmosphere.

TG gets his first sight of the Vincent Canby review. I’ll never forget his face as he studies it, at the table beside Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, with the waiters pushing by. ‘Studies’ is far too mild a word for the extraordinary intensity of Terry’s expression. His eyes stare fearfully like
some Walter Crane drawing of an Arthurian knight confronting the face of Evil. Two years of solid commitment can be rendered quite spare in one review. At the end he lays the paper down … ‘Yes … it’s good …’

‘
The Missionary
Mark II’ arrives from the typist’s, and I fall on it and read it through eagerly. It reads very well and I’m happy with the last-minute cuts and readjustments. And I laughed more, much more, than at Mk I.

Send the script round by cabs to Neville and Richard L. Watch some television. Can’t keep my mind on writing. I’m half hoping the phone will ring before I go to bed and bring some breathless enthusiasm from one or other of them for the new script. This is what I need now.

At 11.30 the phone does ring. It’s Rita from Los Angeles. Though it’s only lunchtime Monday in LA, she tells me (in strictest confidence, she says) that
Time Bandits
took 6.2 million dollars over three days of its first weekend. This is bigger than any film ever handled by Avco (including
The Graduate
).

I’d still rather have had a phone call about
The Missionary
.

Halfway through the morning Neville Thompson rings. My heart sinks utterly as he tells me that he wants to see the original script, because he feels I’ve lost a lot in the rewrites. I’m sure he doesn’t realise what a dashing blow this is after two months’ rewriting. Anything but wild enthusiasm is a dashing blow!

Denis calls in the afternoon and brightens me up with the news that
Time Bandits
has taken (officially) 6.5 million dollars in its first three days in the US. He estimates it will overtake
Life of Brian
’s total US take in two and a half weeks. Incredible news, almost as incredible as Neville not liking the new script.

Still no word from Richard L. Off to Heathrow at 11.00 to take the 12.30 shuttle to Belfast. Bag searched very thoroughly and wrapped in a
cellophane cover before loading. Flight half full. Land at Aldergrove at a quarter to two.
⁵⁰

Belfast is not unlike Manchester or Liverpool. A once proud and thriving city centre suffering from the scars of industrial decline. Fine, red-brick warehouses empty. New office blocks – featureless and undistinguished. The university and its surrounding streets quite elegant; Georgian and early Victorian Gothic.

The Europa Hotel is screened at the front by a ten-foot-high mesh wire and everyone has to enter through a small hut, where my bag was searched again and my name checked on the hotel list. Then into the hotel, with its thick carpets and Madison Suites. No-one seems to find it remarkable any more that such a smart façade should be upstaged by a makeshift hut and barbed wire. Will they make the hut permanent one day? Will it be landscaped – or would that spell victory for the forces of disorder?

I have a pleasant two-room suite with an 8th floor view. Michael Barnes, tall, with long hair and sweeping beard, is very charming. ‘I know we’ll get on,’ he said, ‘because you write such good letters.’ And vice-versa, I should have said, for it was something about his first approach to me by letter that brought me here.

Michael B told me that I was the second Festival attraction to sell out – two days after Yehudi Menuhin and two days ahead of Max Boyce! Anyway it was quite restorative for my ego to see a long queue of people waiting to get into the Arts Theatre.

Up tatty stairs to a small dressing room with light bulbs missing. Sort out my false noses, moustaches and at a quarter to eight I go on. The first part of the programme is what I’ve written and cobbled together since returning from New York. It goes well, but, after what seems an interminable and gruelling length of time, I glance at my watch between changes and, to my astonishment and despair, it’s still only eight o’clock.

In fact it’s just after 8.30 when I finish ‘Fish in Comedy’ – and I’m very hot and sweaty. For a moment the question and answer session seems doomed. Then all of a sudden it begins to happen. A steady stream of well-phrased, fairly sensible enquiries give me ample scope to talk about and enact scenes from all the favourite Python topics – censorship, the Muggeridge/Southwark interviews, etc.