Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (34 page)

One of the King Brothers – Michael, I think – tells of a very funny stage act he used to work with – a man who wore a German First World War helmet and threw a cartwheel in the air and caught it on it as the climax of his act. The audience loved it. Only the rest of the cast (who used to flock into the wings whenever he was on) could see the acute expression of pain on his face every time he did it.

With the lighting already up and the Hendy hotel room piece already played through, I’m ready for my close-ups by a quarter to nine and have done the scene by 9.30. I feel looser and funnier and much more on top of the scene than last Friday and almost wish we could do the whole thing again.

But Eric is much quieter today. He apparently suffered a 24-hour ’flu yesterday, with hallucinations and temperature. His voice is huskier than Friday and he is clearly not happy with the performance. But he improves as we go on, and cheers up too. His son Carey comes to the set, a small, bright-eyed, scrawny little lad clutching a copy of
Rolling Stone
containing an interview with his hero – Sylvester Stallone – in
Rocky III
.

Leave the studio at two. Six shooting days off – feels like a school half-term, saying goodbye to everyone. Home for a wonderfully normal, unrushed, evening with family and a BBC programme on the chances of survival for Londoners in a nuclear attack.

Death from a nuclear blast would be short, sharp and sudden. Especially, the programme suggests, if you’re living in Kentish Town!

To bed, very content.

I go up to CTS Music for the second day of
Missionary
music recording. I’ve never seen film music recorded before, so to enter this spacious modern studio, with its control room like a mighty ship’s bridge, from which the eye is drawn downwards to a 60-strong orchestra, and beyond them to a screen high on the wall on which my antics appear, is stirring and a little frightening.

Everyone seems so competent and capable, from John [Richards] the mixer at his 36-track desk, to Mike Moran with his enormous score sheets, to Harry Rabinowitz (old acquaintance from
Frost on Sundays
!) looking not a day older, with headphones on and baton raised, to the orchestra of session men, who are probably from the London Symphony or the Philharmonic, but today are in jeans and T-shirts and reading newspapers in between cues. It’s an epic undertaking and, when the Scottish themes thunder from the speakers to fill the control room, it’s very moving.

RL and I have been discussing for the last few days an alternative photo idea for the print-ads – of Fortescue under a lamppost in the street, where normally only whores would stand. The contrast would be funny, there are three or four whores in the background to add any of the titillatory element Columbia might want. So it’s resolved that there is no other way but for me to go to Denis this evening and heave some more money out of him.

Surprisingly, he accepts my point that we could do a better job here, and he likes the idea of the lamppost and the prostitutes. He will ring Columbia and tell them we want to shoot an alternative. The onus is now all on us to come up, in quite a rush, with something that lives up to our confident stand.

See assembly of ‘Mr Creosote’ at lunchtime (instead of lunch). Evidently 9,000 gallons of vomit were made for the sketch, which took four days to film. It’s been edited rather loosely at a poor pace and dwelling too much on TJ’s actual vomiting, but the costume is marvellous in its enormous surreal bulk, and Mr C’s explosion is quite awful and splendid.

The sticky heat continues. Oppressive, sluggish, still heaviness.

I feel quite tense from fatigue today and find myself at midday facing a long close-up take with my heart suddenly thudding, my voice thickening and my head swirling. Not a good sign of my condition, I feel. I just want to get away from films, film people and the whole process. But I am firmly stuck in it for the next few months.

As if to underline this, no sooner have I finished at Elstree than I have to go down to the Tower Hotel to prepare for an evening’s shoot on the new poster. Peter Hannan comes along to help supervise the lighting of the street, we have four prostitutes and Angus Forbes is the photographer.

It’s warm and still in Shad Thames where we’re shooting, which helps to keep everybody happy and patient as the clock moves on to midnight, when we finish and drive back over Tower Bridge to the hotel to change. Find myself, dressed as a vicar, with Tricia George dressed as a most comely whore, in the lift with two American tourists. As they disembark at the ninth floor I gently remind them that ‘London still swings’. ‘Right!’ was their nervous parting shot!

I’m home at 1.15.

Collected at 8.30 by Brian. I have a one-hour make-up as Debbie Katzenburg. Feel testy and rather low. For some reason the continuing news of the Israeli bombardment of West Beirut sickens me and I can’t read the paper.

Eric, TJ and myself in drag, Cleese the Reaper, Chapman and TG the men. One of the few sketches involving all the Pythons.

The afternoon’s work is slow – things like JC’s beckoning bony finger taking up a lot of time, as special effects, animals and children always do.

TJ suggests we eat out together. Neither of us notice the irony that, although we’ve spent the whole day on a sketch in which a dinner party is poisoned by salmon mousse, I start with a delicious salmon mousse.

A long morning around the table in a hot studio in drag. Simon Jones is playing the sixth member of the dinner party. He’s a very good man with
a quiet wit, well able to stand up for himself. In one morning he learnt the Python lesson in survival – over-act in your close-up, it’s your only chance. Actually he did his piece modestly and very well.

Long afternoon as we have to dress in cottage walls every time we move round to do close-ups. GC and I are the last to be done. Then more special effects as we die. Eric and I blow out the candles then collapse, motionless on the table for 40 seconds. Cynthia Cleese hiccups during one of these long silences and sets us all off.

The day stretches on into evening and we sit and play games. JC hears that EI is dining out with David Bailey and, when EI has gone, expresses great incredulity that anyone should want to have dinner with David Bailey. Then he suggests we play a game – ‘Not Michael, because he’s far too nice about people’ – to list our worst-ever dinner party.

After JC has been hauled back for yet another close-up of the Grim Reaper, Eric asides to me that it can’t be much fun having dinner with John Cleese.

Tonight at six and eight are the first two public showings of
The Missionary
in America. Keep remembering this at odd times during the day. Moments of pleasurable anticipation.

Wolf a croissant, then up to Elstree for a tiger-skin fitting, only to find that my other half of the skin is in a pink suit doing the ‘Galaxy Song’ on Stage 3. Yet another breakdown in communication. Round to Stage 4 where mighty office buildings are being erected for TG’s £100,000 ‘Accountancy/Pirate’ epic.

Tucked in a corner is a tiny Yorkshire ’30’s cottage, filled with children who are rehearsing ‘Every Sperm’ for Monday. Little Arlene Phillips, with her bright, open, face and pink and maroon matching hair and tracksuit, is taking the kids through the number. We work out some movements for me to do, and then I read the build-up lines – all about ‘little rubber things on the end of me cock’ – some kids snigger, the younger ones smile up at me innocently.

Home – and a relaxing evening in, broken only at one point by a huge series of explosions to the north. It’s not the Israelis bombing possible PLO meeting houses in Kentish Town, or the IRA – the huge cracks and flashes lighting up this stodgy August evening are for the 1812 Overture, being played at Kenwood [open-air concert].

To bed after watching (and staying awake for) Hitchcock’s
Notorious
. Superb performance by Ingrid Bergman. Very sexy. Put the phone right beside me in case I should get word from LA …

Richard L rings about half past two. The news is not good. He says he’s confused and disappointed and just wishes I’d been at the viewings with him. He felt the audience was unsuitable – general age between 16 and 23, predominantly male – the
Stripes
and
Porky’s
sort of audience. All subtitles and understated scenes went by in silence. Howls of appreciation and whoops when Maggie (or rather, Maggie’s stand-in) goes down on me under the bed-clothes and the whores hop into bed.

But the figures – considering the nature of the audience – are not as discouraging when I think about them: 2% excellent, 30% very good, would recommend to friends, 40% average, quite enjoyed it, 19% only fair, and 9% thought it the worst movie they’d ever seen.

RL rings later in the evening. Says he’s spoken with Denis O’B, who was, so I hear, not downhearted. They have come up with a list of proposed cuts which they want to make next week and show at a sneak preview in NYC on Saturday the 14th. Could I come? Concorde both ways. I have to say no, as Python is away on location in Scotland and Yorkshire.

Arrive at Elstree 9.15. Wide shots first, with all the kids in. Mothers in attendance.

TJ is worried that there may be a walk-out if we say either my line – ‘Little rubber thing on the end of my cock’ – or one of the kids’ lines – ‘Couldn’t you have your balls cut off?’ – so we plan a subterfuge. I will say ‘sock’ instead of ‘cock’ (taking care not to over-emphasise the initial letter) and then the dastardly substitution will take place in the dubbing theatre. The boy’s interruption will be of a quite harmless variety – ‘Couldn’t you sell Mother for scrap?’ – when everyone is present, but we’ll record the real line separately when everyone’s gone.

The afternoon is very hard work. I have to go through the opening speeches, song and routine over and over and the room is warming up,
and the kids, though well-behaved, have to be continually instructed and calmed down, which gets tiring. They all call me Dad, off the set.

Finish with the children (as we have to by law) at 5.30 and for a moment Ray Corbett [first assistant director], Hannan, Terry, Dewi
⁷⁰
and myself slump onto chairs in the little room amongst the discarded toys – like shattered parents at the end of a two-day children’s party. Nobody has the strength to say anything for a while. Then, with a supreme effort, we gird our loins and complete my tight close-ups. I end the day wild-tracking the phrase ‘Little rubber thing on the end of my cock’ … ‘
over
the end of my cock’, and so on.

Leave the hotel at 8.30. Drive half an hour out to the north of the city, past more flattened slums, rows of shops with boards and metal frames over the windows. Then through wooded, pleasant suburbs to Strathblane, where we are quartered.

Some hanging around, talking to local press, crossword-puzzling and finally making up with mutton-chop whiskers and moustache, and squeezing into custom-made leather boots and the rather handsome navy blue uniform of a major in the Warwickshires of 1879.

Then we’re driven a mile to the location – a five-minute walk up a hillside, where a British encampment has been constructed beneath a bare rock cliff, which I later gather is known in the area as Jennie’s Lump.

Sudden drenching squalls of rain and cold wind cause us to abandon the planned shots and spend the day on weather-cover, with scenes inside the tent originally planned for Elstree. But it isn’t only the unsettled weather which is forcing us to use weather-cover. Rumour reaches us during the morning that nearly 100 of our carefully selected and measured Glaswegian extras have walked out after a misunderstanding over costume in the local village hall.

A small group of very vocal Africans became angry when they were shown how to tie loin cloths by Jim Acheson (on the stage).
⁷¹
They had
been misled, they shouted. They thought they would be wearing suits. Poor Jim and his excellent wardrobe team faced a 1982 Zulu Uprising, as a group of two or three blacks shouted about being degraded, tricked … dishonoured, etc, etc … And 100 of them were taken back in buses to Glasgow.

We went on shooting – oblivious to all this – and completed most of the tent interiors by six o’clock. Back to the Albany. Bathe and change, looking out of my eighth-floor window across the wet streets to the grand, two-storey classical facade of Currie and Co, Building Trade Merchants. A fine, confident, assertive building, now in disrepair and white with bird shit. It looks as out of place amongst the new Glasgow horrors as a piece of Chippendale in a Wimpy Bar.

Dine with John Cleese and Simon Jones in the Albany restaurant. TJ restlessly at a nearby table with a dour Danish journalist. Simon Jones is relaxed, talkative and amusing. It turns out that he, like me, can’t roll his ‘r’s.

Cleesey very unwell this morning. We think it was the crayfish last night. At the hotel in Strathblane he looks awfully wan and up on the mountainside, as we prepare for the first Zulu attack, he is farting and belching, and at one stage actually throwing up against the barricades.

We have had to recruit white Glaswegians and brown them up as Zulus. I must say they are very patient and charge at the encampment ten times. It’s a long day, heavy on extras and blood and smoke, and light on lines for the officers.

Newspapers – local and national – carry the story of the Zulus yesterday. Some very funny reports, especially in the
Glasgow Herald
. The nationals such as
The Times
, which refers to today’s cast as predominantly ‘unemployed youths’ – note the use of the word ‘youth’, always pejorative – are less accurate. Still, all excellent publicity.