Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (96 page)

As I leave Granny sounds rather a pathetic note, saying that she feels so ‘bereft’ when I’m away. I’m afraid I scold her a bit for using such emotional blackmail, but it does show that she is not as composed as she appears.
Money matters of all kinds are a perennial source of anxiety and I drive myself to the limits of frustration reassuring her that she need have no worries.

Park my car near Blackhorse Road Station and a very easy Victoria/Piccadilly Line ride to Knightsbridge. At Wheelers ‘Carafe’ restaurant in Lowndes Street almost exactly five minutes late for my lunch date with Joyce C.

She is sitting amongst a sea of empty tables, down in the basement. Her neat appearance, erect bearing and eyes with their characteristic imploring look. She’s wearing a very well-chosen azure blue dress with a pattern of white flower petals. She advises me to have the sole. ‘Dover, of course, not lemon.’ She chooses gravadlax to start with. ‘Very sustaining.’

She politely asks me a little about myself, but I hurry on to talk about her and all her experiences. She confesses ‘I’m a bit of a mixed bag, you know. My father was Jewish, but he didn’t know he was Jewish for quite a while … he’d say terrible things about Jew boys and then suddenly remember … ’.

Talk turns to Noël. Her mother – Lilian Braithwaite – was in Noël’s very first play –
The Vortex
at Hampstead Everyman. She tells me, with some hesitation, of something Noël said to her once in a taxi – the gist of which was that he liked Joyce because ‘Though you’re the most feminine of women, you have the code of a man.’ ‘Well, I think it just meant I wasn’t silly,’ she says modestly. But it says a lot about her, and about Coward.

She was with him in Portmeirion and discussed
Blithe Spirit
, which he then went off and wrote in five days. For a time she and Noël C used to, as Coward put it, ‘mystify people’ at parties. They did a sort of improvisation based on characters suggested by the audience and ‘many people tried to make a fool out of him, but no-one ever succeeded’.

The beans arrive, ‘Fashionably undercooked,’ comments Joyce with a twinkle. Rather as with my mother this morning, the only thing that ruffles Joyce’s composure is the financing. She asks several times if she’s paid the bill (she insists on taking
me
out) and the Oriental waiter smiles very tolerantly and reassures her gently.

I walk her back to her flat in Eaton Place, slowly, crossing many roads. She shows me a garden she likes on the way. At the flat she insists on giving me a brandy and then shows me some more of her pictures – including a graphically very bold painting of Coward’s, of a Jamaican standing amidst palm leaves with the blue mountains and dark skies
behind. She’s very proud, too, of the portrait of her mother. A pre-Raphaelite beauty.

At 12.30 to go to Camden Lock to cut a cake celebrating 40 years of the NHS. Frank Dobson, our local MP, is one of the other participants and I’m quite keen to meet him as he’s one of the livelier and more effective Labour performers. Meet him in a café opposite the tatty, run-down Camden Labour Party HQ. He’s a very jolly, hustling figure, full of jokes about poofters in the Durham Labour Party.

We walk to our spot, which turns out to be a small trestle table which is the Labour Party presence at the Lock. Frank has a megaphone with which he harangues the largely apathetic shoppers. Lots of ill-looking people come by – old with shrunken faces and eyes cast down, their faces dull and many resentful of our being in the way.

Frank is heckled by a surly and humourless cluster of
Socialist Worker
and other left-wing pamphlet-sellers, who are virtually falling over each other in Inverness Street today. I only hope they have better luck with the proletariat than we do.

Bathe and shave and then talk over the phone to Benedict Nightingale, who’s writing a piece for the
NY Times
on
Wanda
. He was at Cambridge with JC and remembers him as a quiet, rather self-effacing figure.

TJ then rings. Nicholas Cage sounds like a possible Erik and TJ is going to NYC tomorrow to talk to him. By coincidence staying at the Parker Meridien, as am I.

On the 6.30 news we hear of an Iranian airliner shot down by the Americans by mistake. Nearly 300 killed. Talk of reprisals will hardly reassure my mother!

Buy M Shamberg’s cigars and have a glass of orange before boarding Concorde. I’ve become blasé about travelling supersonic now, which is sad. It used to give me such pleasure. Now it’s like a commuter service. Full of Americans who came over for the Wimbledon final, which was
rained off yesterday. ‘If the rain stays like this, we could be home in time to catch it live on TV.’ None of them mentions the shooting down of the Iranian airliner.

We leave London in rain and low cloud and land in hot sunshine in NYC.

My cab driver, a thin-faced, sallow-skinned, unhealthy-looking white man, talks compulsively – repeating endlessly a story of blacks at Penn Station who’ve taken to robbing car drivers … ‘There’s a fucking precinct house two blocks away! I tell you, if this was New Orleans they’d have sorted those guys out. They’d have broken their fuckin’ legs by now.’

Call Al L only to hear that he has some problem with his spinal nerve and can hardly walk. He can’t come to the screening on Thursday. I suggest that I could go to see him on my return from LA, but his sister has ‘decided to choose that weekend to get married again’. He is mortified and convinced that ‘the big foot’, as he calls it, is coming lower.

Picked up at 12.15 by Sue Barton, whom I remember with pleasure from the
Missionary
publicity days. She tells me Ed Roginski, who was Antonowsky’s right hand and a very good man indeed, is dying of AIDS. She was in California with him yesterday.

It concerns me that I have trouble focussing in on small print. Taking out the diary this morning at the Parker Meridien, reading the menu last night at the Museum Café, remind me that my eyesight is becoming fallible. Also the odd crackle (the only way I can describe it) on the left side of my chest has had me wildly fearing that my system is about to seriously rebel against the demands put on it.

Picked up by limousine and taken down to the Gramercy Park end of town for a series of satellite interviews ahead of the
Wanda
opening. These consist of myself and Jamie on a sofa, John in a leather wing-backed armchair, with some funereal flower arrangement on a table in front of us, being interviewed about the movie by largely invisible interrogators, whose name and destination we only know from cards stuck across the bottom of the camera – e.g. ‘Wilmington, Harry Brubaker’, then ‘Des Moines, Jack Phibbs’. We sometimes hear their voices in our ear-pieces
before the interview begins. ‘Michael
who
?’ I hear from Linda in Washington.

Out to see
Much Ado
in the Park. Our limousine intrudes us almost up to the auditorium itself. We disembark in the middle of a wide-eyed mill of ‘ordinary people’ and for the rest of the evening are on display.

Being one who prefers to watch rather than be watched, I find it all faintly uncomfortable. John cruises along with it, but then he never really does notice people. Jamie is a little brittle, on edge, wanting the fame, because she’s American, but feeling uneasy with it because she’s intelligent.

I’ve never been to the Free Theater before. No-one pays, except for refreshment, so it’s a much less formal, more relaxed crowd than you usually find in a West End or Broadway theatre.

A marvellous production. Full of life and energy and humour. Kevin [Kline] is on great form as Benedick and Blythe Danner matches him. As night falls, the stage and the lights of the village set focus our attention more clearly, as the play is drawing us in at the same time.

My lunchtime radio interviewer has postponed until tomorrow as her husband was held up at gunpoint by two kids in Brooklyn and forced to drive around for much of the night before being robbed.

New York seems a lot crazier than I remember it. Perhaps it’s the heat. Temperatures are up into the low 90’s and it’s humid and cloudy. Thanks to the wonders of air-conditioning I don’t notice the extreme weather – except for the occasional soft blast of air between lobby and limousine.

To the Bay Hotel (formerly the Taft), where we are to talk to the out-of-town press. It’s a most luxuriously appointed hotel on Broadway and 61st. Absurdly expensive touches such as a small silver display tree with a truffle chocolate perched on the edge of each branch.

JC arrives with advance copies of the
People Magazine
review. It’s a rave – especially for John, but nice words for everybody. I’m called a ‘deadpan delight’.

Then we are all distributed to various rooms, and there, like whores in Amsterdam, we sit waiting to be talked to.

We are travelling (Shamberg, Cleese and myself) on MGM Grand Air to Los Angeles. Small, luxuriously appointed airliners (727s) with a convenient and rather cosy little terminal building. The plane itself is decorated like Caesar’s Palace; thick pile carpets, velour seats, deep, artificial and violently unmatched colours, mirrors, frills of one kind and another.

To the Four Seasons Hotel. Both of us so pleased to see unequivocal sunshine after the hazy mugginess of the East Coast that we repair straight away to the pool, which is crowded with rather uncommunicative LA types.

As we sit there, JC opines that he would rather like to do a Python stage show – provided we could do ‘Cheese Shop’. I’m of the opinion that if we do it we should do it in a smaller theatre – 1,000 seat max and well equipped. JC would most like to do it in LA. I favour Sydney.

Talk about GC. John thinks that Marty F[Feldman]’s opinion that GC was in love with JC is not far off the mark.

We swim and sunbathe and then both feel the effects of the NYC week and collapse rather in the evening.

Breakfast at the Sidewalk Café. My first cooked breakfast of a disciplined week. A bookshop adjoins the very busy restaurant and there I buy two or three more Hemingways – so impressed was I by
The Garden of Eden
, and encouraged too by a favourable reaction from Shamberg and Cleese when I told them of the ‘Tea and Hemingway’ script yesterday.

Gilliam is with us. He and Cleese haven’t met for months. Here in the relaxed, neutral and unthreatening territory of Venice Beach, they both unwind. JC chides TG for having to have an enemy, be it a Denis O’Brien or a Sid Sheinberg.

TJ is still looking for an Erik. He sounds dispirited.

I sit by the pool for an hour with JC, who is very chatty. We swim and JC puts down some intense psychology work with a very boring title and poaches my Hemingway,
The Sun Also Rises
.

TJ and Carrie Fisher pick me up to drive down to the Ivy at the Shore
Restaurant, where are gathered, Jamie, Rob Reiner
¹⁸⁴
and Cleese.

Jamie and Carrie immediately fall into conversation – their lives are so similar. Both offspring of star parents, beautiful mothers and promiscuous fathers. Both hardly knew their fathers, both of whom later became dependent on drugs. Both mothers too went through difficult periods. The thought of Debbie Reynolds too stoned to work is, to my 1950’s British view of her, quite unthinkable. Now these two tough children have reversed the roles. They are looking after parents who seem driven to childishness.

Not an easy start for the day. I am at Alex Bennett’s radio show on – with live studio audience. Alex I like – he’s benign, amusing, with a long moustache, a long history and an engaging, elder-statesmanlike aura – but this early exposure to the fans is gruelling. Grins, handshakes, autographs, how-dees, how-are-yers, how-you-doin’s and inane replies to inane questions take their toll, and by the time I’m at the mike in a studio filled with the faithful I’m feeling the pressure.

But Alex seems entirely happy with my presence and schedules me for a further half-hour. ‘When guys like Michael Palin come along, I just want to say hang the news, but we have to have it … so let’s make it quick …’

Back to the Portman for breakfast and the reviews. The first shock is that Canby, such a loyal friend in the past, hates it. But Sheila Benson in the
LA Times
gives a much more comprehensive and better-written rave. Still, Canby rankles and stands as a stern warning against over-confidence.

To breakfast with Tom Jacobson and John Hughes to talk over the ‘Larry Meister’ project.
¹⁸⁵
I like them. Jacobson is quiet, trim-bearded and soft-spoken. He’s from Kansas. Hughes is chubbier, pale-faced, bespectacled,
like the clever boy in the class. Articulate, humorous. They’re both younger than I expected. As so often happens, they know my work more thoroughly than I know theirs.

John C comes down to breakfast, sits at the other side of the dining room and starts to make ‘yak-yak’ gestures out of their view, but not out of mine. Later he is stricken by one of his lung-wrenching bronchial spasms, which usually result from him finding something incredibly funny. In this case it turns out to be the Vincent Canby
New York Times
review. Introductions are made. Jacobson cannot quite get over the fact that we get on so well after twenty years together.

Over to NBC to appear with Jamie and John and Kevin on Phil Donahue’s show. Donahue, an agreeable man of the people, is a show for Middle America, but has big ratings and it is a great coup that he should be spending a whole hour with
A Fish Called Wanda
.