Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (62 page)

Now, whether it’s the effect of a beautiful spring morning, or sheer relief that there is a solution, or a real burst of new thoughts stimulated by Paul’s work, or a combination of all three, Terry and I have not only decided that we shall write the next draft ourselves, but we’ve also set aside the rest of this week and dates in May and June to work on it.

Paul arrives here at one. He’s as nervous as we are about ‘the confrontation’, but over lunch at a chic but quite deserted Belsize Village restaurant called The Orchard, all three of us discuss quite amicably and agreeably the proposed solution. Paul would like not to be ‘dismissed from the case’ completely, but to be there to advise and criticise. ‘Use me, I’m quite good really.’

The
Sunday Times
echoes the prevalent optimism about London with a colour supplement devoted to the revival of the city. Periodically London is rediscovered, it blossoms then fades back into its elusive ordinariness whilst somewhere else is discovered. But if the ’60’s were Swinging London, the mid-’80’s are Smart London. The ‘revival’ is based on money. On the ability of businessmen to do business with the Far East in the morning and New York in the afternoon of the same day. Thank God for the Greenwich Meridian.

Cannot find the right book to read at the moment and feel very exercised about this. Decide on Arnold Bennett – because he describes ‘ordinary people interestingly’, it says on the blurb.

A long night’s sleep enlivened by some wonderful dreams, including Maggie Smith singing a song called ‘Lobster Time’. A fine morning.

After breakfast we go to view progress at Sunset House. Shape of the rooms now clear, so we can make some early decisions about furniture, etc, which is really why Angela and I are up here together. One thing
which slightly disappoints is the height of the bay window, which is such that when you sit you lose most of the view.

I go to the French pub and there are Bernard McKenna and writer Colin Bostock-Smith, sharing a bottle of wine after the successful read-through of one of their scripts. Bernard has severed relations with GC after
Yellowbeard
disagreements. We retell good tales of Tunisia, including the time Bernard and Andrew MacLachlan got an entire Arab crowd to chant ‘Scotland!’ (when GC walked on as Biggus Dickus).

Woken by a loud crash outside the window. It’s five a.m. In deepest sleep the sound seemed almost unreal, a jarring, violent impact with a high, almost metallic top note. Helen it is who discovers a pane of the downstairs window smashed, apparently with the end of a stout, five-foot-long wooden post which lies outside the window. No sign of an attempt to break in. Back to bed after clearing it up. Slightly shaken, but I feel that it’s one of those random, irrational acts of destruction which occasionally occur round here – plants pulled up, aerials bent. Neither of us can think of any reason someone would do it on purpose. Back to sleep. Helen dreams of massive disasters.

At BAFTA at four to meet Tristram Powell, to talk about
East of Ipswich
. He is a lean, open-faced, relaxed man, anywhere between three and ten years older than me I would think.

He, it turns out, is a director, not a producer as I’d assumed, and I think would make a very good job of it. I feel quite a bond with him by the end of our chat. And I have a feeling he’s Anthony Powell’s son, but I never dared ask because it would have involved me having to admit I never made much headway with
Music of Time
Vol I. Now I’m determined to try again.

It would be very neat if all worked out and
East of Ipswich
could be made by Powell some time next year. Certainly our meeting today seems to have solved the major problem of director.

Collect Granny’s
clock from Camerer Cuss – always struck with curiosity as to how the clock expert there manages to reconcile such precision work with his very shaky hands.

To Mayfair to meet TJ and then Sam Goldwyn re the ‘Chocolate Project’. Meet TJ at a pub in Shepherd’s Market. He’s on good form – having just had a ‘breakthrough’ over the ending of
Erik the Viking
.

To Sam Goldwyn’s flat in nearby Hertford Street. Shepherd’s Market feels very much like Soho is always thought to be but never is. Here there are still ladies in doorways who say ‘Hello’ as you pass. Sam settles us both down with voluminous scotches and watches us talk about the film.

At one point find his wife standing at the open window of the bedroom and smoking out of it. When I asked her for the loo, she spun round like a ‘B’ movie actress playing guilt.

After a morale-boosting chat we share a taxi back to Cavendish Square, feeling rather jolly. The sky has cleared and left London looking fresh and sparkling.

Tom Maschler [of Jonathan Cape] rings in ebullient, heavy-sell mood to ask if I will write a children’s story for a new book which will be ‘a very big seller indeed’. He won’t tell me why, but eventually he makes the secret sound so attractive to himself that he has to tell me. Holography is the key. A new process which can apply holographs to the illustrated page – he compares it to the pop-up book, or Kit Williams’
Masquerade
in potential appeal. Maschler exudes self-confidence, power, excitement, fame, success, but basically it’s all a sales pitch. As Michael Foreman is the artist and as it only has 2,000 words, I express interest in a meeting later in June.

Write to Al L and settle to watch the much looked-forward to European Cup Final.
¹¹⁸
Instead find myself watching sickeningly familiar scenes of drunken fans fighting. This time, though, it is even worse – a wall has collapsed, killing 25. No-one seems to know what is going on. Fans are throwing missiles at each other; police with riot shields seem to wander about the ground to no particular plan or purpose, occasionally hitting people as hard as they can. The fences look flimsy, the barriers between the rival sets of supporters virtually non-existent. What were they expecting?

The death toll from the wall collapse mounts, but the crowd, on the verge of hysteria anyway, are not told. Jimmy Hill and Terry Venables trade solutions – national service (Venables), withdrawal of passports, more Thatcherite toughness (Hill), and Bobby Charlton chips in with a plea for the restoration of corporal punishment.

But it is the lack of any controlling hand over the activities at the stadium that is most frightening. Fortunately most of the crowd wait patiently and sensibly, but the ‘minority’ still hurl anything they can lay their hands on. At one end a group of Italian boys posture and swagger with sticks and iron piping, whilst the Brussels police just watch.

To the Royal Academy to look at the Summer Exhibition. Somewhere inside me I just want to enjoy the good things of Britain after the awful shame of Brussels. The events last night were a national humiliation and there’s a sense of sobering shock today, mixed with an almost eerie frisson of fear. I think the actuality TV coverage has made the difference, causing millions of people to experience the violence as if they were actually there.

Crowds mill around the elegant rooms of Burlington House. See one small painting I fancy for £200, but it is snapped up just ahead of me. Come away with only a confused swirl of images in my mind – landscapes, Bonnard-esque views from interiors out through windows, occasional nudes and comfortable portraits of successful middle-aged men.

Some shopping, then home by cab.

Julian Hough has dropped in. He’s just out of the Scrubs, and Helen says he went on about how nice they all were inside, reading Camus and Shakespeare.

To King’s Cross to catch the train up to Hull for my ‘celebrity lecture’. [Part of a series of appearances outside London, which I, and others, had agreed to give for British Film Year.]

No seats are booked in a crowded Edinburgh express and one of the HST cars fails, so we arrive at Doncaster 40 minutes late and have to take a taxi on to Hull. We arrive at the party to launch the Hull Film Festival somewhat rushed. I’m shown straight to the Disabled toilet.

Then into a room full of local worthies. Have to remember that the
Life of Brian
is still banned in Hull! Some sweet German wine, a bite at a buffet and a chat with two very nice people who won a competition for seats at the lecture (which sold out two weeks ago) by answering questions such as ‘What was the name of the leading pig in
Animal Farm
?’

Who should then stroll onto the scene but J Cleese, who begins work on a Frayn script,
Clockwise
, in Hull on Sunday.

John had hoped to get into the lecture unannounced and ask rude questions from the back. As it is, I find him all too near – in the second row, just below the stage on which Iain [Johnstone] and myself recline in rather grand, high-backed winged armchairs.

Q and A with the audience is successful and we go on for 90 minutes before Ian asks John if he has any words to sum up Michael Palin. Poor JC. He tells the audience that I am the most genuinely silly person he knows. ‘He doesn’t have to work at it. It’s straight from the heart.’ I counter by thanking JC for teaching me everything I know.

Discuss mothers with JC, who says with feeling ‘My mother is dreadfully stupid, completely neurotic, but I do like her.’ Later JC thaws out enough to say ‘You know, the other day I suddenly thought how nice it would be to do another Python TV series.’ Here he pauses, very effectively. ‘I thought that for about six hours.’

Driven by the organiser of the Festival, together with two friends, out to Beverley, a very attractive little town. The Minster dominates the skyline rather like the church at Haarlem in seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes. Honey-coloured stonework, very beautiful decoration around the west front, a fine building.

A thriving market place in which stands our destination – the Playhouse Theatre. Built as the Corn Exchange, it has been a cinema for over 50 years. Now run by a largely volunteer force and saved from closure by a fire-eater and his wife. It doesn’t make much money, but they count
Private Function
as a great success – an average of 99 a night, says the manager.

Up a ladder through the projection room to the manager’s office, where I am treated to some of his grapefruit wine. More photographs. Local paper not there, which seems a poor piece of organisation.

From the Picture Playhouse to a Sam Smith’s pub known colloquially as ‘Nellies’ – run until a few years ago by two 80-year-olds who insisted it should not be substantially altered. So, aside from bare wood everywhere, there is also gas light and in the evenings a folk band plays by candlelight.

Back to Hull, pausing to look at 29 Victoria Avenue, where the parents lived in 1932/33. A small, characterful Edwardian semi, with a big mock-Tudor gable and some quite elegant stained glass. It stands in a modest, leafy avenue, built as part of a ‘development’ with wholly surprising baroque fountains at two of the crossroads.

Home by four. Helen in the garden. Join her and am quite lazy until it’s time to go next door to Eliz and Eleas’ for dinner. Five psychoanalysts there. Two Americans, two Brazilians, two Argentinians. The conversation tends to the serious and there is much post-mortemising of the Brussels riots.

Eleas thinks that part of the problem is that the English bottle their feelings and passions up – there isn’t much on-street or café debate and discussion. Emotions too are kept tightly under control, so that when they snap they snap more fiercely and a lot more repression is poured out than in Brazil. The Argentine thinks that the British lack of volatility does have its advantages.

Michael Barnes rings at breakfast time to discuss Belfast Festival dates.

More thunder forecast today. As I run over Parliament Hill I look out over London and it lies swathed in a soggy mist, as if it’s raining upwards from the ground.

Tom is in school doing his second exam paper of the day – ‘O’ Level French – William is off school for four days during this fortnight because of teachers’ ‘industrial action’.

Some more writing, then drive into London, park at the Chinatown car park – near whose entrance gather a group of winos, who sit amongst the litter, occasionally hugging each other, their red blotchy faces the doors they’ve shut against the rest of the world. If they were rich they’d be in clinics in Hertfordshire.

Osborne of Adnams rings to tell me that a new offer of £44,000 for Croft Cottage has been received from the single lady, Mrs Marshall. Should he go back to the couple? I made it clear that I and Ma and Angela all would like the house to go to someone who will live there. This apparently counts out the couple, who want it as a second home, until their retirement. So after some to-ing and fro-ing I agree on Ma’s behalf to start negotiations for the sale of the house for £44,000.

I work through the work I’ve done in the last two weeks on ‘Chocolates’. Then at 12.30 down to TJ’s. He has been suffering a ‘low-grade headache’ for the past two weeks and this finally laid him low over the weekend.

He does perk up, though, enough to get angry about Mary Whitehouse’s remarks re the Brussels tragedy in the
Guardian
. She sees it as an indictment of the permissive liberalism of the last 30 years!

Despite his low state of health he comes up with some good and incisive comments. I leave my notebook with him and at 4.30 set off to drive across London to the TV Centre.