Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (64 page)

I can’t find the bathroom light or get the key out of the door. JJ can’t find the lavatory flush. Fifteen minutes of pure Keystone Cops before we emerge, only slightly less crumpled than before, but at least besuited.

A long table, set with British flags amongst the flower arrangements. Myself and JJ, whose attitude to things I quite like, are sat at the end like naughty schoolboys. In the middle are the likes of Roger Moore, Liv Ullman and the Mayor and British Ambassador.

Speeches at the end. The Mayor of Haugesund is very smooth and fluent and uses references to Andy Capp – ‘We’re passing one of the oldest pubs in London. Capp: Why?’ – and manages to be politely flattering about the James Bond movie
View to a Kill
, with which the festival has just opened.

The British Ambassador murmurs a vague and wet ‘Hello’ as he passes. Clearly not the slightest clue who I am. JJ feels that we’ve been upstaged by Bond. Frankly I was much happier at the naughty boys’ end of the table.

We visit the world’s largest herring table, which stretches for a couple of hundred yards up the main street in an attempt to break the Guinness world record for serving the greatest variety of herrings! Pickled herring in pineapple – that sort of thing.

The
Private Function
press conference has been moved from the hotel to the YMCA. Here, in a gloomy, inhospitable hall, about 30 journalists gather. A quick and nervous man takes it upon himself to introduce me and act as interlocutor. To add to the absurdity, two heavy mikes are on the desk top in front of us.

This overkill produces one of the most uninformative and pointless press conferences I’ve ever attended. But I have to maintain calm and
composure through silly photos outside and two more interviews, even though I’m hot, tousled, sweaty and smell of crab and shrimp.

Nor is there any let-up. Before I can go back to the hotel I have to go to rehearsals for the Amanda Awards, Norway’s first ever film and TV awards ceremony. I have the unlikely honour of presenting the first Amanda of all time.

Norway’s leading theatre actress introduces herself enthusiastically to me. She’s called Winky and as far as I can tell the show’s producer is called Bent.

Leave the hotel at 9.45 for the awards. These go off quite well and I just about get away with my Norwegian pronunciation. At the end all the presenters have to reassemble on stage and simulate the spontaneous joy, happiness, warmth and wonderfulness of the occasion. It’s during this ordeal that friendly Liv Ullman shakes my hand and introduces herself and says she hopes I’m going to the party afterwards. We all stand there with bunches of carnations whilst the press snap away.

At last, when it’s time to go, Roger Moore suggests I come with him and his party back to the Park Hotel – he hints mysteriously at the chance of crayfish. But I have to find JJ and hope I’ll get a chance to talk to Liv Ullman so, unlike Roger M, I give the official party a try.

Crowds of people, but no Liv Ullman.

When at last I reach the Park Hotel it must be around three o’clock. Whom should I encounter on entering, but Roger Moore. ‘Michael! You
missed
the crayfish!’

He welcomes me profusely, and brings from his room a bottle of Chivas Regal and a bottle of Glenfiddich and sets them on the table.

He really wants to say how much he wants to work with us, how he loved everything I’d ever done and watched me on the
Cavett Show
(why this comes up particularly, I don’t know) and so on. He is especially keen to know what Gilliam is like to work with.

At one point a hotel guest comes up to Moore for his autograph. As he signs, Moore points at me and asks the poor petitioner if he knows who I am. The man nods and reveals that he saw
Private Function
this morning. ‘Did you like it?’ asks Moore. He nods. ‘Which did you like most, his film or mine?’ Bravely the man considers, then, with a shriek from Roger Moore, indicates me.

As we set off for bed, Moore reiterates his desire to do something – indeed anything – with the Pythons. ‘I work cheap.’

It is a quarter to five.

Lunch with Basil and Pat [Pao].

Basil spent two weeks in Cotignac working on ‘The Rutland Isles’ script with EI. Basil suggested a change in approach which was evidently too drastic for Eric, so the collaboration sounds only fifty percent successful. He seems now much more certain that he will get the job of assistant art director on the Bertolucci China movie [
The Last Emperor
] if and when the finance is finalised.

Into Covent Garden for some shopping, to Peter Lewis in Parkway for a check on my new bridges. He took his family in a minivan up the east coast, then up through Lancashire. ‘Depressed towns really interest me.’ He went to Rochdale, on his holiday.

Outside it begins to rain heavily and I hear the clock strike one downstairs well before I slip off to sleep. I wake about six hours later and lie for a while wondering why I was able to sleep for nine hours night after night in the Seychelles. I conclude that I am suffering from a condition which expands even small anxieties into a general level of tension which it’s hard to evade at night and which awaits me first thing in the morning. Not that today threatens any major worries, but maybe Tom’s imminent ‘O’ Level results are there at the back of it all.

Hear Mother coughing. She ‘wakes’ me at 8.15. There’s been another air crash, she says, pushing aside the curtains to reveal the clear blue sky of a perfect East Anglia morning, something at Manchester …

Phone rings at ten. It’s Tom. He sounds worried, says Mother, holding out the phone and looking thoroughly confused. Talk to him. He’s passed in six out of seven subjects so far, with chemistry a disaster and English still to come. This is right at the top end of his (and my) expectations and I’m terribly pleased for him.

Talk on the phone to Tom Maschler. Bad news, he says, Michael Foreman has decided he hasn’t time to be involved. ‘He’s probably heading for a nervous breakdown,’ confides Tom. Maschler, I fear, is one of those manically energetic souls who never get nervous breakdowns, only give them to others.

Lunch with Geoffrey Strachan. We meet at 1.15 in Fleet Street Rugantino’s and talk about GS’s idea for a Palin travel book. Decide that it should take the form of a diary, should be unashamedly personal and subjective and based on my notes taken over the years, as well as trips to come. GS likes my plain title ‘Going Abroad’, and I quite like ‘Travelling to Work’. Agree it should be a project for at least two years hence. Both of us become very enthusiastic.

After lunch I walk to the Turf Club for my annual visit.

The club is open, but deserted. I sit myself at one of the dull, brown leather armchairs on the dull, green carpet beside the huge windows overlooking the dull drizzle over St James’s Park.

On the way out I at last hear sounds of life from the billiard room, but on looking in find the barman playing on his own. By the door there is a neatly-typed notice reminding members that denim jeans are not considered permissible apparel. I leave and cross the road in the rain. Looking back I have the melancholy feeling I’ve just visited a benevolent old uncle in hospital. And he hasn’t long to live.

TG comes round and we proceed together to the BBC for a photo-session and lunch/reception to mark the release of the Python videos.

On the way TG brings me up to date with the
Brazil
saga. Sheinberg is refusing to make up his mind, but has it put about that he will not be releasing the picture this year, and that there is still work to do on it.

But Arnon M has artfully revealed to an LA journalist that several of the national critics, including Bruce Williamson and Joel Segal, have seen the film in its original version and raved about it. The story, published in an LA paper recently, has added fuel to the controversy and hopefully will force Sheinberg into a more positive attitude. A decision is expected this weekend.

We assemble in a bunker-like room beneath the BBC in Langham Place. Terry J is back from France and looks slightly dazed. Graham, rather pale and thin-faced, is benign, amused and, as always, not quite there, and John, sporting a blue pin-stripe suit with dead parrot tie, is his usual lordly self. Eric is not present.

We have our photos taken with rather dog-eared cut-outs of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ in a small garden in Cavendish Place. It’s all rather low-key, as none of us can think of anything interesting to do, and we all come to the conclusion that zaniness after 40 isn’t possible.

Back to the basement, where food has been laid out (including dressed crab, which is definitely a step up in BBC’s catering style) and a Python video replays ‘Piranha Brothers’ and ‘The Spanish Inquisition’ in the background.

After what seems like an hour of talking, one of the organisers notices I haven’t had a spare breath for any food. Gulp down some crab and pâté and then am dragged back to answering why the Pythons don’t get together any more, when all I want to do is get together with the other Pythons.

Talk with Richard Seymour – the hologram man. They now have secured the services of Alan Lee to replace Mike Foreman. According to Seymour he is the finest illustrator working in the country today – as was Mike Foreman, when he was on the project.

I feel more and more like the world-weary, worldly-wise old owl these days.

As the rain and wind spread yet again from the west, I go to bed with
Adrian Mole
, which I’m discovering for the first time, and find it makes me laugh very much and, I think, for all the right reasons.

Sleep well and wake in good spirits to a bright, cloudless sky. To work by 9.30 after a bloater breakfast. Quite a successful morning on ‘Cyril’, considering this is my first day devoted entirely to the new project.
Cyril and the House of Commons
comes together quite nicely.

After lunch I concentrate on the clearing of Croft Cottage. Already we’ve filled a black bag with old bills and accounts and other minutiae which my father would never throw away. Go through a lot of photographs from the halcyon days of my father’s life. Full of smiles on the liner ‘Arcania’ coming back from the USA in the mid-twenties. Lots of pictures of him dressing up and fooling about, then some more suave portraits. His nose and prominent, rather sensuous eyes and lips remind
me closely of Tom P. He was a very pretty boy and doubtless had to fight off a few at Shrewsbury!

The clearing is at once a revelation and an irksome, rather depressing job. My mother keeps finding fresh bags of letters, or old ties, or other objects, which appear, unannounced, on my bed, on the desk where I’m working, or in the middle of a room we’ve just cleared.

In late afternoon I revisit Sunset House and find two or three things still to be done. Drop in on Brian Duncan who is, as usual, gaily reassuring about everything.

Back to Croft Cottage for what I suppose may be my last run along these lanes.

It couldn’t be a more perfect evening to remember them by. A big, burning, golden sun slowly descending behind Reydon Church, brushing the deep golden brown of the corn with a tinge of red. A harvester, with visored driver, is cutting the corner field.

In mid-afternoon I drive down to the V&A to see the watercolours of Bonington, Prout and others of the early nineteenth century. This at the behest of Lewis the Dentist, who collects nineteenth-century watercolours.

Find an artist called William Wyld, who excites greater admiration than either the neat, methodical Prout or the elusive, but exceptional, Bonington.

Then up to the top floor of the Harvey Cole Wing to look at the Constables – very appropriate as I did homage to Dedham Vale yesterday. Realise for the first time that the A12 dual carriageway runs clean across the middle of Constable’s favourite view.

Back to ‘A Consuming Passion’. TJ reads me, over the phone, a letter from Paul Z – ‘Seriously, I hope you won’t fault me if this letter doesn’t overflow with enthusiasm for a draft that virtually obliterates my previous work.’ His letter is like Paul – funny, articulate and bracing. But his reaction, together with Amanda’s two-page critique, combine to reduce our energy and enthusiasm. Suddenly it’s an uphill task again.

After lunch TJ suggests we avoid Grove Park for working as they have
a pneumatic drill in action. So we go instead to his boat in St Katharine’s Dock. Here, two huge cranes swing round on a nearby building site, helicopters rattle overhead every 15 minutes and there’s the constant distraction of various other members of the boat-owning community arriving back unsteadily from lunches.

The dock should be a charming, attractive haven, but I feel uneasy there. Uneasy at the scale of development, building and demolition which marks the ‘regeneration’ of Dockland. It’s being largely undertaken by the big construction companies and will, I fear, come out as a grotesque parody of Olde London – neither excitingly modern nor convincingly historic. I think it’ll be buggered up in the way the City of London has buggered up its Thames shoreline (though perhaps nothing could be as bad as that).

Have been dipping into V Woolf ’s extraordinary diaries over the last few days and found a neat phrase – to ‘rout the drowse’. Sounds like street talk, in fact it describes what a good walk does for her creative energy. So, as I feel increasingly addled, I eventually go for a run, which routs the drowse most successfully.

We seem unable to clinch a screenplay and I think it’s because we have different preferences which it’s hard to reconcile – TJ for fantasy and more overt moralising, myself for the fine detail of life, without necessarily having to make a judgement. TJ wants to be engaged in the issues. He wants to tackle injustice, incompetence, bigotry or whatever head on. I am more the spectator. More detached, therefore perhaps more able to go in close without getting stung.