Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (33 page)

In between play I’ve been singing ‘Sperm Song’ to Trevor Jones’s rather solid beat. Eventually we find a combination of takes we’re comfortable with and I drive home to watch the second half. England fail to score and slide out of the World Cup. It’s a hot evening.

Third day of another rail strike. NUR gave in rather pathetically last week. Now it’s ASLEF’s turn [ASLEF was the train-drivers’ union]. Reprehensible Thatcher statements likening ASLEF to the Argentinians we defeated ‘so gloriously’ in the Falklands.

Drive in at ten and we rehearse three or four sketches, on sofas doubling as First World War trenches, with our scripts in hand. Fizzles out about one. Costume fitting for me as a schoolboy.

Home for a run, do some work, then I have to change, bathe and go down to meet Marvin Antonowsky at Odin’s. I’ve arranged the meal at his instigation, and he says he’s very pleased that it’s only the two of us, as he would just like us to get to know each other a little better.

He seems to be rather ill at ease with the food and the ordering, but talks quite fluently about his early days in advertising, his admiration for Frank Price – the President of Columbia – his stint as head of programmes at NBC, during which he claimed credit for starting
Saturday Night Live
; his move to ABC and eventual elevation to marketing head at Columbia.

He compliments me, with a sort of little head on one side smile, ‘You’re a good little actor … you come over well on screen.’ He clearly wants to work together again and assures me that Columbia would like to do the next thing I come up with. When I tell him I’m meeting Neil Simon to discuss a part he gets very excited. Like all Californians he uses hyperbole quite undiscriminatingly, starting with ‘wonderful’ for people whose guts he probably hates and working up through ‘amazing’ and ‘marvellous’ to ‘absolutely incredible’ human beings. Neil is ‘absolutely incredible’ and ‘a great friend’.

Over to Inn on the Park to meet Neil Simon. A man of about my height with a warm, friendly manner answers the door. He apologises for walking with a lean, but five days ago he slipped a disc, after watching Wimbledon (at Wimbledon – he’s a tennis freak). Apparently he went into spasm one morning as room service called and he retold, with comedy writer’s relish, how he pulled himself across the room and collapsed at the open door as he let in his breakfast. He couldn’t be moved from the doorway for two hours – body half out in the passage as curious guests walked by.

After some talk and some morale-boosting admiration of my ‘natural
and likeable’ acting persona, he told me of his project – a half-written play with a part just right for me. Apologising for being unable to précis the idea, he asked if I had time enough to read the 60 pages of his typed first draft. I agreed readily. He gave me the script, then went discreetly into his bedroom with the two
Ripping Yarns
books I’d brought as a present for him.

I recall the play was called ‘Heaven and Hell’ and began, with a disconcerting resemblance to
Arthur
, on a scene between an elderly butler and a very rich young man who is a miser. He’s bashed on the head in a carefully organised collision in his car and taken by a gang to a warehouse which has been got up as heaven.

It looks so like the heaven that this character has come to know from the 1940’s movies he always watches, that he believes in it and when they tell him he has three days to go back to earth and raise enough money to avoid them sending him to hell, he falls for it. Some very funny lines, but a disappointingly one-dimensional character.

I find my attention wandering as I read to what I’m going to say to this most famous of all American comedy writers when I’ve finished. Fortunately he makes it very easy for me and we talk about the character and I can express some of my feelings about him being real and understandable and Simon agrees and says he will put in more at the beginning explaining the young man’s miserliness. I have to say that I can’t make up my mind, that I’m very flattered, etc, etc, but being a writer myself I will probably want to write something of my own after
Missionary
.

Truth be told, I found the play lightweight in the two areas I enjoy so much – character and detail. I’m very tickled to see he has a rather insignificant character in his play called ‘Antonowsky’.

To Claridge’s to meet Ken Blancato – Columbia’s VP of publicity [to organise a shoot for their poster]. Am not allowed into the cocktail lounge, as I have no tie or jacket. ‘Rather silly in this weather, I know, sir … ’ agrees the porter in thick overcoat who escorts us out.

Sit in the lobby and have a couple of beers. Blancato is a New Yorker and worked in Madison Avenue. He’s also a frustrated writer. When I reiterate my reservations about the roof-top shots with the girls, etc, he grins rather wearily. I feel I’m just making a nuisance of myself.

I go on from Claridge’s to Neal’s Yard, to try another recording of
‘Every Sperm’, as Monday’s didn’t sound entirely satisfactory. André and Trevor have rather different views of how to approach my vocal, and it’s not a particularly successful session, as I’m in a rush anyway.

On to Mon Plaisir for a meal with TG. He says he’d rather like to be a monk. We talk some business. We’ve seen figures that show 17 million dollars returned to [Avco] Embassy [from
Time Bandits
] and none of that is owed to either of us.

Car picks me up at 8.30 and drives me down to the Great Northern Hotel. King’s Cross and St Pancras silent and deserted at the end of the first week of the rail strike.

Onto the rooftop – another hot, slightly hazy morning. Richard is there with son Joe, a bit subdued. Also he doesn’t like what David Alexander [the photographer] and Camille – the bored, drawling, world-weary Columbia lady who is Blancato’s number two – are doing. He’s very quiet as Alexander sets up the shot and fires off reels of film like there’s no tomorrow.

At lunchtime we’re finished and down the contraceptive-scattered stairwells into cars and on to Lant Street, where Norman Garwood and co have rebuilt my Mission bedroom.

I have to work rather hard leaping up and down and presenting endless expressions to seemingly endless rolls of film, whilst the photographer urges me on with shouts ranging from ‘
Won
derful,’ which means very ordinary, to ‘Just the best!’ when I’m trying a bit.

At one point Camille, who looks dreadfully out of place in her Beverly Hills straw hat and white strides, steps in to change a shot in which three Mission girls are in bed, and I’m below. We’re not allowed to show any rude bit, or suggestion of a rude bit, so I’ve made sure that the girls are well-wrapped in sheets (quite unlike the way they appear in the film). But this is not enough for Camille, who fears that the very suggestion that the girls might be nude
under
the sheets could result in the ad running into trouble in the Deep South.

At this my fatigue – that intolerable fatigue of working hard on a job in which you have no confidence – causes me to crack and we have a heated exchange on the subject of
The Missionary
and the Deep South. ‘It’s not me … ’ she keeps pleading, which makes it worse, because I want to know who it is who wants to do this to our film. That there are more
than averagely narrow-minded people in the Deep South I don’t doubt, but what are we all doing here today, working our asses off to try and reach down to their level?.

Slept unsatisfactorily – woke at intervals from four o’clock onwards. The adrenaline is beginning to flow – the surge of nervous energy that I will need in the next ten weeks has to come from somewhere and the last two weeks since
Missionary
‘finished’ have not really been enough to get right away from one film and into the other.

To the Royal Masonic School in Bushey, a largely red-brick amalgam of all the old public school architectural clichés. A few flying buttresses here, a clock tower and some cloisters there.

JC asks me about ASLEF and the implications of and background to their strike. I think he might be sending me up, but he’s quite serious. I was quoted, somewhat misleadingly, in the
Mirror
on Saturday as saying I supported ASLEF. It’s just that I can’t stand to hear this self-righteous government trying to pretend it’s more of a friend to the railways than the proud, independent, much-maligned and bullied train drivers’ union. If the government really had the good of the railways at heart this present action would never have happened.

We’re starting with a scene involving Cleese and myself and an entire chapelful of boys and masters. I play a chaplain and the similarities to March 29th continue as I don a dog collar and have my hair swept back. I even keep my
Missionary
moustache.

To the Masonic School again. Feeling of despondency as Brian drives me into the gates. I feel no emotional attachment to this location, as I did to those on
The Missionary
. It’s a place of work. The weather doesn’t help – it’s overcast and looks like rain. Caravans are a good walk away from the location – so nowhere really to rest during the day.

EI cheers me up. He’s in good form and we sit and make each other laugh whilst waiting for lighting set-ups in the classroom. I’ve brought him Signford’s two Chris Orr books, which he wants for David Bowie, who has much admired Eric’s Orr collection.

Keep in touch with Missionary, where Maggie S is patiently waiting
for me to come in and post-synch with her. But have to keep giving them increasingly pessimistic estimates and in the end the session is abandoned and I find myself still being a schoolboy in Bushey at seven o’clock.

Leave at eight and drive out to Twickenham. I enjoy the sunshine and the emptiness of the roads and the little courtyard at Twickenham Studios, with flower tubs everywhere, is convivial and friendly. Richard has arrived on his bike, which he describes disarmingly, as ‘Probably the best that money can buy’ – and then proceeds to tell stories about how he fell off it and rode into parked cars.

Post-synch the entire ‘Bottling Factory’
⁶⁸
scene and we finish at one o’clock.

As I arrive back at Julia Street I find a group of kids around a cat lying in the gutter – obviously barely alive after being hit by a car. I ring the local RSPCA and they ask if I could bring the cat in. Am just loading it into the hamper I won about 30 years ago in a Fry’s Chocolate competition when the Browns – the Irish family on the corner opposite – return from their Sunday lunchtime trip to the pub. Mrs Brown becomes very tearful when she identifies the cat I’m bundling rather unceremoniously into my hamper as once belonging to her granddaughter Deborah, who died tragically of appendicitis after a doctor’s mix-up.

I drive to Seven Sisters Road. RSPCA man thinks there’s a fair chance of its survival, which I wouldn’t have expected. Cats’ broken pelvises do heal quite successfully usually.

Home to the Browns to bear them this welcome news. Mr Brown, who calls me ‘Palin’ or ‘Young Palin’, insists that I stay and have a drink. A Scotch is all that’s on offer – served in what looks like an Austrian wine glass. But it’s very pleasant – like walking into the snug bar of a very convivial pub. No introductions or all the delicate, defensive small talk which the middle classes are plagued with – the Scotch warms me physically and mentally and I have a lovely half-hour. Mr Brown very Irish, with lilting voice, soft and very articulate, and always a quiet smile in
everything he says. They couldn’t be more different from the sobbing group I left half an hour before. They celebrate their happiness just as enthusiastically and openly as their grief.

My twelfth early start, and twelfth working day on the trot. At least this morning I am spurred on by the sight of light at the end of the tunnel – by the prospect of not only a weekend off, but then seven filming days in which I’m not involved.

But today is no easy downhill slope. For a start Eric and I have a long dialogue scene [in the hotel sequence] – four and a half minutes or so. TG has a wonderfully complex and grotesque make-up as the Arab Porter. Then there is much re-lighting and building of rostrums after TJ decides to shoot the whole scene in one. So Eric and I walk through at 8.30, then wait, in make-up and costume, until a quarter to one before they are ready.

We do two or three takes at about 1.30, and in two of them I forget my lines and have to stop – which is unusual enough for me to make me rather cross and depressed when lunchtime comes. I really feel the accumulated fatigue of an eleven-week shoot and then these last twelve working days. Fortunately after lunch with EI and the strangely attired Gilliam, I feel better and, although I have to push myself physically hard, I find that I’m actually enjoying the piece.

TG, with his blind eye (as used in
Holy Grail
), nose too big for him and the wheel on his false hand broken, has created for himself his own peculiar nightmare, and he will be trapped in it again on Monday.

A party at Barry Cryer’s in Hatch End. Roomful of comedians. R Barker, R Corbett, Eric Morecambe, Frankie Howerd, Peter Cook prominent.

Chat with Ronnie C. With a relieving sense of self-mockery, he reveals his customary interest in Python’s financial affairs, business arrangements, etc. RB looks around gloomily. ‘Too many comedians here,’ he says. ‘Not so good for character actors.’ He too is obsessed with Python’s wealth. ‘All millionaires now?’ he asks, not wholly unseriously.

Peter Cook, who wasn’t exactly invited, is more forthcoming and entertaining.
He’s come straight from Vic Lownes’s
⁶⁹
house and somehow found himself at Barry’s. He’s very pleased with the video version of his Derek and Clive second LP. He says it’s going to be shot in 2-D. He asks me in what part of Africa
The Missionary
was shot. Turns out his father was a DC in Nigeria. Cookie, in a rare moment of sentiment, clearly felt quite an admiration for his father – ‘People ask me about influences on me – the Goons, Waugh, etc, etc – but in the end the person who influenced me most was my father.’