Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (75 page)

To the Fox preview theatre in Soho Square to meet John C, and for the first time the various people involved in ‘Goldfish Called Wanda’. Charles Crichton does seem to have some difficulty with speech and movement, but has a wicked smile and I get to like him more and more as the evening goes on.

We’re seeing an American film called
Ruthless People
¹³⁴
which has taken a lot of money out there.

It’s a West Coast film and I suppose is as far from the intelligent, perceptive, graceful world of Woody Allen as it’s possible to be. But the fact that it has been so successful accords with my reading in the paper that 40% of students in a poll at the California State University hadn’t heard of Mikhail Gorbachev.

On afterwards to a meal at the White Tower. Jonathan Benson, who is now with Shirley Russell,
¹³⁵
immensely good company and it’s so good to see him again. Later Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates arrive, though no sign as yet of Jamie Lee.

Kevin K, quite unmaliciously, recounts tales of Sir Dickie calling African extras ‘Darling’ to their obvious bewilderment. They’ve been filming ‘Biko’ [later,
Cry Freedom
] in Harare, which he found incredibly dull and uninteresting and says he feels they got out just in time.

To the Great Western Hotel for lunch with David Mitchell.

The Minister, plus two private secretaries, arrives at one. The three of them immediately go to the toilet.

A pleasantry or two. He was at the House until 4.31 this morning. Then I begin by mentioning the topic that cannot be ignored – the report in the papers of this very morning that the government is to cut BR’s grant by 25% next year.

He tries to lecture me (agreeably enough) on the link between funding and performance, on not solving a problem by ‘throwing money at it’. I declare my readiness, as a taxpayer, to see my taxes used for the creation of the best possible rail system, and so we go on.

He seems almost frustrated by BRB’s [British Railways Board – the management] willingness to accept these cuts. He suggests that they don’t need to. If they feel unable to keep up quality of service on the money they are getting, then they should say so.

We leave at eight for JC’s birthday party at 82 Ladbroke Grove, whose interior glitters and drips pictures and opulence. It’s been once again redesigned, and has a lush, soft, rich creamy feel to it.

Michael Frayn is there – nice, ironic, soft-spoken with a gentle, permanently amused look. Reminds me of his contemporary, Bennett, in his undemonstrative self-possession.

Talk to JC’s mother, who sits in a corner and talks quite cheerfully about how she’s been stuck in the corner. Keeps saying ‘John would think I’m silly’ or ‘John would tell me to stop being a nuisance’. She’s 87 and seems extraordinarily fit. Am able to tell her how the recent
Fawlty
repeats keep my mother from total gloom!

Jonathan P calls by with [his son] Patrick. Hear about Jonathan’s battle with the sponsors. He refused to play Macbeth (the day before rehearsals began) when he saw that Barclays Bank [who had invested heavily in South Africa’s apartheid regime] were sponsoring. Barclays’ £60,000 was returned and JP kept on. But he’s been suffering from considerable
criticism, especially from the theatre staff, who resent his interference. He says he’s had notes stuck under the windscreen wiper of his Mercedes giving last year’s Mercedes sales figures in South Africa. But he’s weathering the storm. His hair is growing long and his beard looks more like Lear than Macbeth.

A Russian visa application arrives by motorbike. William has to be taken to an architect’s practice in Camden Town where he is starting a week’s ‘job experience’.

To King’s Cross and the sigmoidoscopy clinic. There are seats outside it now where you can wait. An elderly man next to me reads his M M Kaye whilst from within there are some stomach-chilling shrieks of pain.

At my desk at 9.30. Down to page-numbering, but still noticing bad lines, overwritten, unnecessary dialogue and plot discrepancies. Change as much as I can, and by half past twelve the completed screenplay – eight weeks, roughly 300 hours of writing – is ready for its first delivery. Only as far as Alison and the word processor this time, but it feels satisfyingly weighty and, whatever its deficiencies may be, I feel a sense of relief that I have persevered and have completed the process. If I’d left it half done, or even three-quarters done, feel it might have joined many other uncompleted screenplays in the ‘One Day Perhaps’ file.

Drive down to the Imperial War Museum for a party to launch Spike’s latest and last volume of war memoirs.

Spike is in a three-piece striped suit, the suit he uses, so he says, to visit his bank manager. At his most benevolent and easy. I tell him how I read an extract to a fourth-year class at William Ellis of his
Hitler – My Part
and suddenly found myself describing the ‘semen-stained underpants’ of Sergeant Harris. Spike thinks my discomfiture hilarious. I leave him to his various admirers. He sits down for most of the party and people come to him.

To Ealing for a look at
East of Ipswich
. My first sight of it for three months and first sight of the finished product (give or take some grading adjustments). Enormously pleased. George Fenton’s music adds a touch of class and life to the piece wherever its pace slackens. The sound-mixing is confident and all in all it seems to work most gratifyingly. The comedy and the pathos, the atmosphere and the oddness all seem to balance and Edward R-H’s performance grows in stature every time I see it.

Afterwards have a drink with Tristram P in the Fuller’s pub across the road where we so often used to end Python filming days. It’s half past five, dark already, but clear and cold and I feel an unequivocal glow of achievement as I drive home.

1.30 Python lunch. I’m the first there. Eric, with a little trilby hat on which reminds me of his unforgettable portrayal of the Duke of Kent, steps down from a taxi. Sign a
Life of Python
book for his mum, then Terry J, Terry G (encased in thick Donegal tweed coat) and Anne and Steve all arrive. Terry J has got everyone kissing everyone else these days, but I pass on TG and Steve.

TG is soon to announce
Munchausen
and would like to announce a sort of post-Python production company, based in Delancey, etc, like Enigma or HandMade. Eric suggests Enema – motto ‘bums on seats’.

At five o’clock to squash with TJ. I just win the battle of the business lunch.

Then I have to hurry across a wet and windswept London to 82 Ladbroke for a reading of ‘Goldfish Called Wanda’. My first acquaintance with this project, which is already as far as having chosen the caterers.

Inside the warm, soft-pile comfort of JC’s home, Jamie Lee Curtis awaits. Physically much more delicate and waif-like than one expects from her screen presence and her face somehow darker and slimmer. She has a softness guarded by a sharp-eyed, defiant exterior. Kevin Kline arrives half an hour later, from almost his last day on ‘Biko’.

After Chinese take-away supper, we settle, around an artificially roaring log fire, and the windows slightly open as it is such a warm night, to read the ‘Goldfish’. We don’t finish until twenty to twelve, and this is the problem. This quick-fire farce should have been over in half the time, but
Kevin finds it difficult to sort out his various voices and the Anglicanisms such as ‘loot’ and ‘doing the job’. John has to explain the stage directions at some length, so it all drags on a bit.

I enjoy playing Ken and see potential for a much more eccentric, physical and unusual character than I usually play. JC is quite straight. There just aren’t enough laughs. Maybe they are all there, but this evening compares unfavourably to the readings of Cleese/Chapman sketches which were nearly always a treat.

Jolted to hear that Angela has been no longer able to cope with her depression and has been taken into the West Suffolk Hospital for two weeks. This hits me hard.

It’s half past four, USSR time, as we touch down. A queue at the passport control. Another Englishman next to me warns of at least one and a half hours of queuing, here and at baggage control. Gloom descends, which isn’t helped by standing for four or five minutes in the glow of a prison-search-style striplight, with an angled mirror beyond so they can check the back of my head. But I’m cleared through.

A very reassuring, British figure steps forward to meet me. ‘Are you Mr Battersby?’ Then I’m alone again. Notice a pretty, befurred Russian lady eyeing me. She introduces herself as Helen and hands me a business card on which her name is printed as ‘Elena’. Call her Elena from then on.

She whisks me briskly through baggage clearance. A huge Seagull (Chaika) black limousine is waiting. Looks like a ’50’s Chevrolet. Russian pop music blares out. Elena asks the driver to turn it down, but the control isn’t working. Eventually he tugs at some connection and the whole system gives up.

Cannot take in much of what we’re passing as we speed along a broad, straight, featureless, empty road towards the centre of Moscow. I am to be driven directly to the Archive Theatre, where
Jabberwocky
is to be shown at seven o’clock.

Enormously wide, straight roads, bulky solid buildings, wide, empty spaces, soaring walls. Feel like Tom Thumb.

The Archive Theatre has Russian and British flags up outside and heads turn as I emerge from the Seagull. Hands are shaken and I’m taken into a back room where coffee cups are laid out, alongside cakes, pastries and orange and mineral water. No sign of a vodka anywhere. (Apparently Gorbachev has decided to try and confront the problem of drunkenness and officially frowned upon alcoholic entertainment. No public places are allowed to serve alcohol until after two o’clock.)

Terry and John Cartwright of the British Council and David Robinson of
The Times
arrive.

Terry G comes in, rumbling in American and with his video camera turning. He even takes it into the auditorium, where 300 Muscovites are assembled to watch the film we made together ten years ago. As part of his speech he turns the camera onto the audience. Most laugh. Some do their hair.

We’re presented with carnations and the film begins. Watch 15 minutes or so. Rather depressing reminder of how much my face has aged in ten years.

Then I’m driven to the Sovietskaya Hotel to wash and brush up before catching the 11.45 night train to Leningrad. (I later hear it on good authority that most Intourist trains run at night so that foreigners won’t be able to see ‘sensitive’ installations.)

Talk for a while. David Robinson tells of the way Murdoch bussed his journalists into Wapping.
¹³⁶
He had certain phone numbers to ring to find out where the bus would be leaving from, and always an Australian voice answered! His review of
Rosa Luxemburg
was criticised for taking up too much space when there was an English film also on release. ‘We are a conservative paper,’ he was told.

Outside all is grey sub-light. A line of tanker wagons silhouette against the sky as we move slowly into Leningrad.

Magnificent view of the Neva from my dispiriting little room.
Everything functional – one tiny picture, three empty beer cans in a cupboard, water too dirty to drink, bedside light switch doesn’t work.

When the pilot announced we were leaving Russian air space there was a ghoulish cheer from Americans on board but one American student I just spoke to claimed his Moscow trip had been the ‘high-point of my year’.

Like the American I found the visit an extraordinary and unusual one. A glimpse into a world about which we talk so often and yet know so little. The beauty of Moscow was a surprise – the number of churches on the Kremlin, with their twirly domes quite the antithesis of the monumental architecture I’d expected. The warmth and friendliness of most of those we met was reassuring and surprising.

The early comfort-shocks – poor lighting, poor food, absence of small restaurants and bars, joinery that didn’t join, almost empty shop counters, cheap and grubby curtain and furnishing materials, exasperatingly impenetrable bureaucracy, compounded by the gloomy weather and gloomy faces – were depressing and almost frightening after the West.

However, as the days went by I adjusted. I no longer kept making comparisons with what I’d left, but with what was there, and though my material expectations may have lowered, I was able to enjoy and appreciate other values – an absence of the bombardment of advertising, a lack of anger, violence and pressure, the pleasure of discussing basic issues of freedom, responsibility, social organisation and the like in a country where all these issues really matter.

The knowledge that the Workers’ Revolution has only produced a different kind of privileged elite who
can
travel abroad, who
can
book tables in restaurants and who
do
get food from private sources without having to queue, gives one the impression that this is not a particularly happy country. But the genuine warmth and emotion from Elena when we kissed goodbye today at the airport makes it impossible for me not to want to return.

My last memories are of the airport building, which was clean, spacious and almost empty. And TG and his four-hour video film of delegates to the first British film week for seven years, slung round his shoulder as he scuttled off to the flight to Rome and discussions with the
Munchausen
designer.