Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (38 page)

‘Hold your nose and blow,’ suggests a helpful neighbour.

‘Blow what?’ she cries, mystified.

We are bundled off briskly in LA. Almost a couple of hours late, but through the airport, or rather the half-rebuilt shell of it, in about 20 minutes. Outside a shambles of pick-up vehicles, including my enormous length of grey limousine, which is accompanied by a dapper little matching grey driver, who takes me direct to the Academy of Film and TV Arts.

At the Academy I meet Ed Roginski and Marvin, and other Columbia folk, as cocktails are being served before the showing to what seems to be a large and impressive audience, full of critics and film folk.

Grit my teeth over the sound in the pre-title sequence – how I want that hymn sound to crescendo! – and the grubby darkness of the boat sequence (one of the less successful in the movie), but the audience respond well and pick up most of the possible laugh moments, applauding occasionally. Marvin, next to me, disconcertingly keeps checking his watch.

The Longleat sequence is clearly going to become a classic, with Hordern’s performance beyond criticism.

Marvin takes myself and Linda Barker, head of talent relations (!), to a meal at Trumps – all white walls and very chic. I think I ate some bass. Best news is that we have picked up another good review in
New York Magazine
.

A brief meeting with Marvin A and Randy Wicks to show me two alternatives for the newspaper ads – one has ‘Michael Palin’, the other ‘Monty Python’s Michael Palin’. I am against the ‘Monty Python’ mention and Marvin gives in to me, though he would rather use it. The small print ads are using the lipstick on the collar picture – so all that extra work was worth it.

Four interviews in my quite small suite fill the afternoon, then off to
The Merv Griffin Show
. These are the appearances I look forward to least. The movie is sacrificed to the ego and image of the host – which is what these shows are all about. Merv just makes money and grins egregiously. He has not seen the movie.

I wait in a green room, with no sign of a decent drink, together with
two ‘nutritionists’ whose book
Life Extension
is a national best-seller in this land of instant cures. They remind me of the old quacks of the Wild West selling patent medicines. They are an extraordinary pair. He talks incessantly, she, small and wiry, shows me her arm muscles.

As I’m leaving the studio Jack Lemmon passes, with a crowd of guests. A publicist asks me if I want to meet Lemmon and before I know it I’m shaking hands with the great man, who turns out to be a Python fan – as are all his family, he says.

I tell him that he and Peter Sellers are my favourite comic actors of all time. As if he’s been on chat shows so often, Lemmon quickly cues into an anecdote about Sellers writing a whole set of false reviews of a Lemmon film which completely fooled him. But he looked baggy-eyed and unfit, and a slight slurring of the words and blurring of the gaze suggested he’d been at the old liquor. But at least I’d told him how wonderful I thought he was.

I’ve survived the day pretty well on adrenaline, but as I relax over a meal with Polier and Knopf and their wives at the Mandarin in Beverly Hills, I begin to wilt.

I glean from them that Columbia are confident enough in
The Missionary
to have increased the prints to 500, that Polier and Knopf reckon three million dollars for the first weekend would be what they would hope for, and that they share my view that outside the big cities the film could be slow.

Alarm call at 6.30. Down to the limousine at seven. The sun is still not up as we start towards the airport. Tom, the driver, is a Romanian, and this accounts for his strange, very correct English. He works for a firm whose boss was once Elvis Presley’s bodyguard and who specially asked him to tell me what a total fan of Monty Python Elvis was!

I’m at LA Airport and checked in by 7.45. ‘Vicky’ is our stewardess for the flight. As she goes through the ritual of checking our names, she comes to the seat next to me – a rather overweight, middle-aged American announces his name is Boyer. ‘Oh, that’s pretty,’ she returns automatically.

Delivered about six to the Sherry Netherland. Two windows look straight down 5th Avenue into the forest of skyscrapers and the others look the length of Central Park South and out to the Hudson and the New Jersey shoreline.

Collect magazines, as this is the first day of public reviews.

Anson of
Newsweek
, we already know, liked it.
Time
, we suspected, didn’t, and mercifully their totally dismissive review is short – though top of a column in which three movies are contemptuously tossed aside under the heading ‘Rushes’. I find myself in company with Sean Connery and Fred Zimmerman’s
Three Days Last Summer
, and the almost universally mocked
Monsignor
, with Reeve and co, as victims of Richard Schickel’s contempt.

But
New York Magazine
’s David Denby runs it as his major movie story of the week, with a photo and the subhead ‘
The Missionary
is a satirical and naughty film – an aesthetically pleasing object that’s also very funny.’ Columbia’s rep is very pleased and now feels we have enough to launch the movie on Friday
with
reviews.

At three Stuart from Columbia arrives with a middle-aged reporter from the
New York Post
. The trend of the
Post
’s questions reflects the newspaper. Why do we always go for religion? Do I expect shocked reactions? Surely the sight of a priest in bed with three women at
once
is going to cause some problems? (Smacking of reporter’s lips.) When I point out that I am never seen in bed with three women he seems genuinely perplexed and shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Well I’m
sure
I saw you in bed with three women.’

Into the traffic on what has become a hot and sultry evening, as I head out to La Guardia and catch the Eastern shuttle to Boston.

I’m no sooner there than a local TV station is clipping mikes to my shirt and sitting me down in the foyer beside the popcorn with a light glaring in my face and an earnest lady reporter who hasn’t seen the movie. She asks me questions like ‘Do you believe in God?’ and ‘Your children are very important to you, right? How are you structuring
their
future?’ She actually runs out of tape on the question ‘What do you believe in?’

After the session, at which I’m encouraged by this predominantly young audience’s applause when I mention the names of Maggie Smith and Trevor Howard, I’m taken out to eat with Michael Bodin, the critic of the
Boston Globe
.

He thought
The Missionary
was a good film, but could have been a great one. Interestingly enough, he used the Magna Carta line in Africa as an example of the promise of greatness which he felt the first five
minutes of the movie held out. This line was inserted at the very last minute of the very last dub.

We talked about movies until the waiters began to put chairs on tables at a quarter past twelve. (He it was who told me of the latest piece of linguistic butchery at the hands of the anti-sexists – in nearby Cambridge, Mass, the term ‘waitress’ is out, replaced by ‘waitrons’.)

I’m beginning to develop a phobia about American make-up artists. With very little grace they just slap on layer after layer of base and powder until I resemble Michael Palin about as much as the Madame Tussaud’s waxworks resemble real people. Today a large black lady in a curiously confusing blonde wig works me over. ‘I saw you on
Good Morning America
… you looked awful … all white … what was the trouble?’

‘Make-up,’ I replied with pleasure.

As the release day comes nearer, I feel myself wanting the pace to accelerate.

Variety
calls the movie ‘congenial but commercially uncertain’. It’s a mixed review, complimenting me on my acting, liking the film, finding some ‘wonderful moments’ and ‘exquisite photography’, but managing to sound quite negative in conclusion. The script could have gone into more detail on three of the sub-plots, it said.

The doubts sown by
Variety
are encouragingly countered by
Hollywood Reporter
, which thinks the film an artistic and box-office winner for Columbia. This is the only review so far to suggest we might make money, and coming out of such a hard-nosed journal as the
Reporter
makes it doubly welcome.

I go on to
The Letterman Show
in the last half-hour. I bring a grubby cellophane bag of things to present to Letterman but refuse to open up. He never tries to get into the act much and just lets me go on. I overact and fool about shamelessly. But he shows a clip and reaffirms that the
reviews have been good and I get some laughs and applause and at 6.30 another show is over.

Back to the hotel, wash, change, then drive downtown, collecting Richard Loncraine on the way, to talk to a film class. Disconcertingly, they take a straw poll (before I’ve been revealed to be there) in which 40% of his audience say they didn’t like the film. One woman who did like it, says ‘I hate Michael Palin, but I loved this movie.’ Richard nearly died at this.

We drive in search of tomorrow’s
New York Times
. The excitement mounts as we find ourselves a half-hour early at the newsstands, so we head for the steamy rear of the
New York Times
building.

We wait in the car as Stu [Zakin, from Columbia] disappears into the night. He races back. Our pulses race with him. ‘It’s there!’ he cries. ‘It’s there!’

‘Well bring it, for God’s sake …’

‘I need
change
,’ Stu shouts, in a rare show of excitement. We have a rushed whip-round and he disappears again.

At about 10.10 he reappears with two copies of tomorrow’s
Times
. I read one. Richard and Stu the other. I start from the top. Stu, much more practised, flips through to the end. He is the first to discover it’s a good review. We have the most important critic in New York, and another daily paper to boot. That’s two out of three, whatever else happens. Relief and joy.

Back on my own in the Sherry Netherland at 1.15. I spread out the
New York Times
lovingly. Better than Canby’s review is the big ad for
The Missionary
which contains quotes from four good reviews, including one from
US Magazine
’s Steven Schaefer, which I didn’t even know we had. ‘Don’t Miss The Missionary – a delight from beginning to its marvellous end.’ ‘Hilarious – Michael Palin is smashing’ –
Cosmopolitan
. ‘Michael Palin has finally left his mark’ – even
Newsweek
’s backhanded compliment looks stirringly impressive in big print.

How on earth can I sleep? Who can I ring? They won’t be up in England, so I try and sleep and will ring early.

There can have been few better moments when I’ve laid my head on the pillow than at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, New York City, as the rain finally breaks the late heatwave.

And the news continues to be optimistic. Rex Reed has given us a glowing review, which makes a clean sweep of all three New York daily papers.

Over to WCBS and Independent News Network to meet Jeff Lyons. At the end of the radio interview he asks if I will put my voice on tape for his home answering machine. Apparently he asks everyone he interviews to do this and now has an unrivalled collection of phone answerers, including David Niven, Peter Ustinov and Max von Sydow.

Then round to the crowded, noisy, dark security of the Oak Room at the Plaza for a drink with Nancy and Bruce Williamson – the
Playboy
film critic. Bruce is very good company, a droll but not pushy teller of stories and a lover of trains to boot.

During the afternoon the gilt has been slightly skimmed off the top of the critical gingerbread. I picked up a copy of the W
ashington Post
, to find myself judged very harshly by one Gary Arnold, who seems to have felt the film was an unmitigated disaster for which I was almost entirely to blame.

Helen and I have been apart for nearly four months this year, and when I called her yesterday, full of excitement at the news from NYC, she sounded so glum that I changed plans to leave on Sunday and decided to go back as soon as possible. I’ve been sustained over the past few weeks by interviews and the anticipation of reaction. Now the first wave of reaction has come and gone I want to get away from limousines and hotel rooms and do things for myself again.

On to Concorde, which leaves on time at 9.30. Only famous face I recognise is Rupert Murdoch, spectacles low down on his nose, looking like a don putting finishing touches to a thesis.

We cross the Atlantic in three hours and 15 minutes and I’m home at Julia Street six hours after leaving the Sherry Netherland. Lovely to see them all again.

I ring Neville, Maggie Smith, Norman Garwood [our art director] and Peter Hannan in a mood of great elation. Thank God it’s over.

Denis rings from Dallas in mid-afternoon. We have apparently done well in New York and Los Angeles, but not well outside the major cities. He gives me some fairly wretched figures: 800 dollars for the first night in Boulder, Colorado; equally unimpressive in Las Vegas – just over 1,000 dollars; Phoenix 1,500 for the first night.

Denis saw a rave review in Dallas last night, but it isn’t doing any business in the south as a whole. Denis’s projection for the first weekend is 1.8 million dollars – a long way from Knopf and Polier’s estimate given to me as we sauntered down Rodeo Drive, licking ice-creams, ten days ago.