Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (40 page)

He will play
The Missionary
until Christmas then take it off and re-play it again in February, with press, in selected markets. ‘The one thing
The Missionary
has done,’ affirms Marvin, ‘is established your creditability outside of the group … I shouldn’t say this to you, but you are now established as a
very
good light comedy actor!’

I buy Marvin the meal and we part, with a bear hug, in Devonshire Street, soon after eleven.

Largely spent assembling speech for the Society of Bookmen tonight.

Leave for the Savile Club at six o’clock. Walk across Christmas-crowded Oxford Street and arrive by 6.30. The dark-panelled lobby of the unexceptional house in Brook Street is no preparation for the prettiness of the upstairs rooms in which the Society are holding their Christmas dinner. Beautiful walls and ceilings, the dining room picked out in eggshell blue and evidently based on a room in the Nymphenburg Palace at Munich (a nice link with Python!)
⁷⁹
and the anterior room equally delicate, but in autumnal colours.

No-one recognises me at first and they all look frightfully impressive, reminding me of university dons – not exactly smart and well groomed, but rather academic and a few very distinguished manes of white hair.

I’ve based the first part of my speech on the fact that Sir Hugh Walpole, the founder of the Society, is not mentioned in the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. But very few of the assembled gathering seem to know or care much about their founder – so the first minute or so is received politely. Realise that they are going to be a difficult audience. Clearly they aren’t going to laugh uproariously. Nothing so uncontrolled. But I persevere and adapt my pace and the level of delivery and salvage some respectable applause.

Then some questions. One particularly granite-faced old man asked me who my three favourite humorous writers were. Why three, particularly, I don’t know. ‘Nabokov,’ I began. He clearly didn’t regard this as serious, so to annoy him further I followed it up with Spike Milligan. ‘Oh, he’s a bore!’ says this most interesting of men.

Then a squarely-built, rather rabbinical-looking figure rose momentously and I felt I was about to be publicly denounced. But instead he suggested that, as my speech had been probably the best he’d ever heard at the Savile, the restrictions on reporting be lifted, allowing the
Bookseller
to reproduce my magnificent words in full. Only a few people supported this particular line, however, and I was left with the curious sensation of
having simultaneously delivered an excellent speech to half the room and a dreadful one to the rest.

The man who had so fulsomely praised me turned out to be one Tom Rosenthal, Chairman of Secker and Warburg and Heinemann. He later asked me, most respectfully, to sign his menu.

Collected
Variety
and saw that
The Missionary
was still in touch with the leaders in its third week – at No. 6. New York seems to be saving
The Missionary
almost single-handed.

As I draw up outside the shop in Old Compton Street to buy the paper, I hear on a newsflash that Marty Feldman has died after finishing
Yellowbeard
in Mexico [He was 47]. The
Mail
rings later for some quotes. My best memory of Marty is that he was the first person to talk to me at my first ever
Frost Report
meeting back in 1966.

Take Helen and her friend Kathryn Evans to the Lyric Theatre to see Spike Milligan’s one-man show, which opened last night. Only half full, I would estimate. Rather tattily put together, with a lot of lighting and sound botch-ups.

He obviously knew I was in because he kept shouting for me … ‘Is Michael Palin here, and has he paid?’ Then in the second half he read a poem for me.

In the evening we go out to dinner at David Puttnam’s mews ‘empire’ in Queen’s Gate, Kensington. Beautifully furnished and full of fine things, but also a lovely mixture of irregular spaces, large kitchen and small bedrooms off passageways, and a spacious upstairs sitting room with an unlikely roaring wood fire. A country farmhouse on three floors.

He’s off to the States on Thursday to show the first cut of
Local Hero
to Warners. Compared to Columbia, his approach to marketing
Local Hero
in the States is very sophisticated – involving the enlistment of ecology groups and other special interest groups that can be identified and given preview showings, etc.

Puttnam confesses to loving working out grosses – sitting up long into the night with his calculator.

The Oscar for
Chariots of Fire
– Best Film 1981 – is almost casually
standing on an open bookshelf. A heavy, solid, rather satisfying object. Has a Hollywood star ever been clubbed to death with an Oscar? It feels in the hand like an ideal offensive weapon.

Richard has received a letter from Denis O’B, thanking him again for his work on ‘
The Mish
’ and offering him five more percentage points on the film. ‘Now I know it’s officially a flop,’ was RL’s reaction.

A drunk in charge of a Volvo banged into me in Camden High Street. I tried to borrow a pen from passers-by, but they were all drunk too. It was like a dream.

James Ferman, the film censor, had seen ‘
Mish
’ today, given it an ‘AA’ and said he thought it marvellous, one of the best comedies he’s seen. Now why can’t we put that on the poster instead of ‘AA’?

Up through Covent Garden to Leicester Square to see
ET
.

The theatre is, of course, packed solid, and the lady next to me starts crying quite early on. It
is
a magical film, affecting and fresh and surprising and delightful despite all the prolonged build-up. I would think it almost impossible not to enjoy it if you have any sense of magic and imagination. It’s pitched perfectly and, though many of the moments and situations are on the verge of being at least clichéd, at worst corny and sentimental, the picture succeeds all along with its supremely confident story-telling. Rachel is the only one of our party who comes out in tears, though I have been brought, pleasurably, to the brink on half a dozen occasions.

Later that evening Spike Milligan, in conversation on BBC2, names me as one of the few people (Norman Gunstone and Tommy Cooper are two others) who make him laugh.

Set off, in a mad rush caused by a rash of ringing telephones, to meet my fellow dignitaries by Kentish Town Station.

We gather beneath a brightly painted canopy, salvaged with great imagination by a couple of local architects, BR and Camden Council from the remains of Elstree Station. Camden School for Girls sing carols behind the red ribbon, and a member of Camden’s planning department struggles to make himself heard over the dual roar of Kentish Town traffic above and British Rail’s trains beneath whilst being totally upstaged by an eccentric-looking old lady, with what appears to be a laundry bag, on the dais behind him.

My celebratory ode goes down extremely well and as soon as I’ve finished there is an instant demand for copies. I’m posed for silly photos and asked by one passer-by if I do this sort of thing professionally.

To Nigel G’s
⁸⁰
gallery, where I meet him and Glen Baxter, a cartoonist with Python-like tendencies, whom I greatly admire. Baxter has a thick tweed overcoat and a podgy, easily – smiling face below a knitted tall hat. He looks like a sort of Yorkshire Rastafarian.

We talk over how best Nigel and Glen B could get a film about Baxter together. He’s avoiding doing too many more of his
Impending Gleam
-type pictures as he feels he’s almost saturated his own market. It’s not just that there are a spate of bad Baxter imitations, but what hurts him more is that some people think the worst of them are done by him.

Call David Knopf. The bottom seems to have completely fallen out of
The Missionary
on its sixth weekend. A meagre 248,000 dollars. Knopf again strongly recommends collaboration on a film with John Cleese. ‘Comedy team of the ’80’s,’ says he.

Early lunch and, at 1.30, a rather hasty and precipitous departure for London, as I have to be at a Python film viewing at three o’clock. Only an hour from Abbotsley to Gospel Oak. Roads very empty until we get into London. Lots of people taking Boxing Day constitutionals on the Heath. Drop the family off, unpack the car, then down to Wardour Street.

The Bijou is packed and hot and smoky. All sorts of familiar faces there – Arlene Phillips (who’s just been turned down as choreographer for the new Travolta film, she tells me), Jim Acheson (still full of
excitement about the New York Marathon – he says I
must
go next year) and old acquaintances rarely seen these days like John Sims [the photographer] and C Alverson [writer and collaborator with Terry Gilliam on
Jabberwocky
]. Eric I conspicuously absent.

The film seems to go very quiet about a third of the way through, but ends very well, with ‘Creosote’ the high point. Afterwards I find that most people felt the first half worked very satisfactorily and if there
were
any longueurs they were either in the ‘Pirate/Accountant’ sequence or towards the end. But most people seemed to be quite bowled over by it.

This time five out of six Pythons have seen the film. There are no drastic differences of opinion. Everyone feels that TG’s ‘Pirate/Accountant’ section should be in the film, not as a separate little feature on its own. And everyone feels it should be quite heavily pruned. I suggest it should be ten minutes at the most, Terry J about eight, Graham, quite firmly, seven. GC gets a round of applause from the meeting for his performance as Mr Blackitt, and TG for his ‘Death’ animation.

Thom Mount from Universal, who has come over to discuss release dates, etc, breaks in to announce that he thinks the film is wonderful and he would hardly change a single moment. As he’s quite liked and respected by us all, this does visibly change the mood of the discussion.

Universal want some previews in the US as soon as possible to test reaction. They want to attempt a first ad campaign too.

All of which puts considerable pressure on my Indian travelling companion Mr Gilliam, who must cut his ‘Pirate’ piece, complete his animation and discuss ads, all before he meets me in Delhi on the 23rd of January.

I was about to take on a mini world tour. A combination of a family holiday in Kenya (organised by Monty Ruben, who had sorted out our
Missionary
shoot in Africa), publicity for
The Missionary
in Australia and a long-awaited tourist visit to India, where I was to meet up with Terry Gilliam.

 

 

Aware, as I write the heading, of the ludicrous ease of world travel today. Here I am imagining myself in the steps of Marco Polos and Vasco da Gamas and Livingstones and Stanleys – or any one of a dozen Victorian lady missionaries – and yet between 9.30 and 12.30 this morning I passed Mount Kilimanjaro and the Ngorongoro Crater, crossed the Zambezi in flood, flew over the Limpopo and reached the Transvaal – and all this with no greater discomfort than waiting for the next Buck’s Fizz to arrive.

Land 20 minutes early at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg. The ambivalence of the world’s attitude to South Africa is apparent straight away. Here is a smart, expensive, efficient international airport and yet there are not enough airliners using it to justify the installation of jetties.

Most conspicuous absence of course is the American airlines. And one can understand it – America, for all her faults, has confronted all the problems of an open, free, multiracial society and taken its share of riots, marches and protests. South Africa has tried to avoid the issue.

My driver is a black and, as we drive in through neat and tidy suburbs, past white congregations filing out of church, it all looks so peaceful and contented and comfortable that I’m forced to ask him a few journalist’s questions. His replies are not voluble, or emotional, but it’s clear that he does not see things with quite such rose-tinted spectacles. ‘In England it is better, I think.’

He doesn’t say much for a while, but just as we are turning towards the hotel he says ‘I have dignity … just like anyone else … This is what they won’t let you have here… dignity.’

My hotel turns out to be a characterless Holiday Inn amongst a lot of
equally characterless buildings that comprise the characterless centre of Jo’burg. There
1983
is a station which is about 100 years old, red brick and vaults and marble columns and elephant’s head motifs and a frieze depicting, I presume, the Great Trek.

In the middle of all this I find the Blue Room Restaurant. Tables set out with solid Sheffield stainless steel, plates bearing the emblem of South African Railways on substantial wooden tables set beside polished marble pillars. Whatever the food, I have to have my lunch in the middle of this faded splendour. The meal is one of faded splendour too. I choose an Afrikaans dish, Kabeljou, which turns out to be a rather chewy piece of battered fish, which reminds one how far Johannesburg is from the sea.

Afterwards I walk into the station beneath a ‘Whites Only’ sign. Make my way down to the platform and, like a good trainspotter, walk up to the sunlit end where the big locomotives wait.

As I return I find myself, for convenience sake, taking the nearest stairwell, and the fact that there’s a long line of blacks going up it too doesn’t occur to me as at all odd until I come out at the top of the stairwell into a completely different Johannesburg from anything I’ve seen so far. Broken cans, discarded bottles, dirt, blowing paper, and, though it’s full of people, none of them is white.