Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (14 page)

I take William over to Upton Park – not more than a 40-minute drive – to watch Sheffield Wednesday versus West Ham. The usual 10-15 minute walk from car to ground, but two tickets are waiting for us – £3.50 comps – left by the Sheffield trainer. And inside it’s perfect. A cold, but dry afternoon with a wintry sun lighting up the East Stand opposite us. There’s a crowd of 30,000 and an anticipation of good things to come. All the images with which the press have fed us over the last weeks and months of the danger and alienation of the football grounds are absent. I feel quite elated to be there with William and our thermos of hot chocolate and a brass band playing marching stuff over the loudspeakers and an Uncle Mac-type announcer advising the crowd to enjoy themselves judiciously – ‘Let’s keep the fences away from Upton Park’. And I notice for the first time the absence of the now increasingly common steel barriers to fence in the crowd.

At Gospel Oak Station by a quarter to nine to combine a visit to Southwold with my first opportunity to thoroughly revise the
Time Bandits
script for publication at Easter.

It’s a dull and nondescript morning – the shabby, greying clouds have warmed the place up a bit, but that’s all. I reach the station in good time. Holly Jones is waiting for her train to school, having just missed the one in front with all her friends on. It’s she who tells me that over in New York John Lennon has been shot dead.

A plunge into unreality, or at least into the area of where comprehension slips and the world seems an orderless swirl of disconnected, arbitrary events. How does such a thing happen? How do I, on this grubby station platform in north-west London, begin to comprehend the killing of one of the Beatles? The Rolling Stones were always on the knife-edge of life and death and sudden tragedy was part of their lives, but the Beatles seemed the mortal immortals, the legend that would live and grow old with us. But now, this ordinary December morning, I learn from a schoolgirl that one of my heroes has been shot dead.

My feelings are of indefinable but deeply-felt anger at America. This is, after all, the sort of random slaying of a charismatic, much-loved figure in which America has specialised in the last two decades.

Once I get to Southwold I ring George. And leave a message, because he’s not answering.

I work through for a five-hour stretch and we have a drink together by the fire and watch tributes to John Lennon, clumsily put together by newsroom staff who know a good story better than they know good music. And Paul McCartney just says ‘It’s a drag’ and, creditably I think, refuses to emote for the cameras.

What a black day for music. The killer was apparently a fan. The dark side of Beatlemania. The curse that stalks all modern heroes, but is almost unchecked in America – land of the free and the armed and the crazy.

Arrive a couple of minutes early at Liverpool Street, enabling me to catch the five to six North London Line. Solemn rush hour travellers, preoccupied in themselves, until a man gets on with a watch which plays
a ‘digital’ version of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. This makes many more people than I’d expect start giggling. Which is heartening.

At home pick up car and race out to a meeting with Denis O’B at EuroAtlantic. All routine stuff, until Denis makes me a convoluted offer of 180,000 dollars to go to Sri Lanka (he shows me most alluring pictures) and take Helen and the kids for a while, early next year. I’m a little lost as to why, then suddenly the penny drops. He’s trying to get me to rewrite
Yellowbeard
again!

All I commit to Denis is that I shall have a first draft script of my own movie ready by the end of June, 1981. And that’s that. Denis does tell me, which I must say I find a bit surprising, that TJ has agreed to the Sri Lanka bait and will be working on
Yellowbeard
. I won’t believe this till I see Terry.

Watched Ken Loach’s
The Gamekeeper
on TV. His lack of sensationalism and his delicate and seemingly effortless portrayal of real life amongst those people generally ignored by the commercial writers and directors is really admirable. He is, I think, the most consistently rewarding director working in Britain. But his marvellously observed celebrations of English working-class life will, it seems, never be as popular as the escapist gloss of
Dallas
. Which is a sad thing. Write 17 letters in reply to some of the 40 or 50 I’ve had as a result of the ‘Railway Journey’. Quite a different audience from the Pythons. Mostly 70 and retired, I think. Is this the Silent Majority?

At one I leave for a Shepperton Board Meeting. Fortunately
Ragtime
are about six weeks behind, keeping the studio well-used over Christmas and into January.

One of the few things on offer in early ’81 is
Yellowbeard
. I’m not surprised to hear from Charles Gregson [a fellow director of the studio] that he was told that
Yellowbeard
was a Python film and that I was in it.

My foot is alarmingly red and a little swollen and Helen has looked in her books and is bandying words like ‘toxaemia’ around. I have two tickets at the Screen on the Hill for the first night of Woody Allen’s
Stardust Memories
. I hope that people will mistake me for an aged, but legendary film director as I drag myself, arm round Helen’s shoulder, up Haverstock Hill. Actually I feel more like a Lourdes pilgrim fighting off disease and imminent death just to reach the shrine of comedy.

The cinema is full and I like the movie very much indeed. But I can see that my appreciation of some of the scenes depicting horrific excesses of fan worship comes from having experienced this sort of thing and viewed from the other side, this could be seen as Allen kicking people in the teeth.

Though my foot still throbs angrily, I feel the worst is over. I have been cured by a Woody Allen movie!

The Irish hunger strikers have called off their action within 24 hours of the first expected death. This is the good news for Christmas – though how I abhor the naivety and dangerously ill-informed sensationalism of the
New Standard
billboards in Soho yesterday – ‘Total Surrender’. The demise of London evening papers over the last five years is terrible to watch.

Amongst the snippets of information buried away in the Sunday papers under endless travel articles and ads, is one that really made me feel that we live in special times – industrial output in the 1970’s in the UK rose by 3%, the only decade when it hasn’t reached 10% since 1810. Will this be the decade then that future historians see as the end of the Industrial Revolution?

Tom roller-skates up and down deserted streets outside. It’s a chill, dull day. Willy and [his friend] Nathan do experiments – making cork tops fly out under pressure of a murky vinegar and yeast mixture and other Just Williamish pursuits.

Denis O’B calls. Says he’s taken a New Year resolution not to mention
Yellowbeard
and probes a little as to my intentions. He can’t really operate satisfactorily, I don’t think, unless he can have all his clients neatly filed and buttonholed under ‘a project’. I am trying – and intending – to be unbuttonholeable for as long as I can.

To Owen the Feet at half past nine. Still having difficulty vanquishing the bugger and he re-dresses it, though I expressly forbid any of the acid which nearly burned my foot off just before Christmas. But he’s quite gentle and efficient and we get on much better now that our ‘political’ limits have been drawn up. I learn he was a Mayfair foot man before. He is the society chiropodist I wrote into
The Weekend
.
³⁰
I

On to Wardour Street for a viewing of
The Long Good Friday
, which looks like being HandMade Distributors’ first product. It’s a story about gangland violence and organised crime in London.

Yes, it does glamorise violence, but any violence is glamorous to certain people and you would be irresponsible to only make films about ‘nice’
subjects. And Bob Hoskins’ portrayal is excellent – and the whole film justifies itself by being a well-written and quite thought-provoking piece. I put it after
Babylon
and
Bloody Kids
³¹
in a top ten of recent socially-provocative, English-made pictures which all deserve support and a wider audience.

Jim Beach
³²
rings. He wants me to write a ‘Biggles’ film script. Apparently they have commissioned one which was strong on adventure, but lacking in humour. Just like the ‘Biggles’ stories, I pointed out. Jim laughed, a little unconvincingly. ‘I hear you’re unbribable,’ he cajoles. Depends what the bribe is, say I. ‘Oh, there is a lot of money’ – he mentions in rapid succession Robert Stigwood and Disney and director Lewis Gilbert, who was ecstatic when he heard I was being approached. Eric Idle had told Beryl Vertue in Barbados that Michael was
the
world’s best ‘Biggles’ writer.

I weathered all these names and these flatteries and came out with my own individual project intact. Still free. Indeed, strengthened in my determination by these blandishments.

Bought
David O. Selznick’s Hollywood
, plus a tin of praline for G Chapman’s 40th birthday. We go round to Graham’s for a party.

The house reflects the change in GC’s living habits. Instead of boxes full of gin and tonic bottles, a rather medically-oriented bookcase. No tobacco wads lying around – the place clean, spotless almost. Graham has a flashing bow tie and is tanned from a sun machine.

Meet Ray Cooper, soft-spoken, rather spare and wispy musician who is Denis’s latest client and who will be in charge of the difficult task of coordinating and arranging George H’s music for
Time Bandits
. He’s a very unassuming, instantly likeable guy, with a bright Greek wife. Has a house in Wapping. In Narrow Street.

As Ray and wife and Helen and I talked on, we realised that most of the heterosexuals had left. Went upstairs to see Kenny Everett, who was sitting in David’s room on cushions, with lights low and three or four young lads in attendance.

Everett was a little drunk. Liked the railways, said he hated television. We had a rather stilted conversation, then he asked me for lunch. I think 1981 could be the year of a thousand lunches.

A year and a fortnight ago it seemed that the world was coming perilously close to a global punch-up when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. But it turned out that it was microphones rather than sabres which were being rattled and everything went off the boil. Looking at
The Times
and
Mirror
headlines this week, I fear we are little further forward, in fact, probably many steps back.

Poland, so directly involved in the start of one world war is, we learn, in danger of being occupied again. Reports resurface in the papers, rather randomly, to the effect that the recent activity of the ‘free trade union’ movement, Solidarity, is about to goad the Russians into another New Year invasion.

So the pressure is kept on to stand ready to defend ourselves against the still creeping tide of international communism. (This is when our own capitalist alternative is unable to give three million people in this country anything to do.)

This brings me to the heart of the fears which, in my uncharacteristically pessimistic moments, tightened my stomach one morning this week. Dr Kissinger. He’s loose again. Talking about the need for more US military involvement in the Middle East and waving away the European peace initiatives. Here is the ‘diplomat’ of the ’70’s – the has-been who believes the world must be run by brute force – and it surely cannot be coincidence that his latest iron-fisted threats come only five days before Ronald Reagan becomes President.

Up at half past eight and taking William down to Hamley’s to spend the £7.00 token he’s been given by Simon A.
³³

Regent Street is delightfully free of punters. The crescents and stars of the Christmas lights looking naked and forlorn in the sunlight. We wander around, dazzled with choice, in this grubby and overrated toyshop. Willy can’t decide what to buy.

But I’m less reticent. On an impulse I fork out £59.25 for my first ever electric train set – a Hornby layout with a Coronation Class Pacific. I’ve waited 28 years for this moment since I used to watch Anthony Jonas in Whitworth Road play with his layout – and occasionally be allowed to put a derailed cattle wagon back on the line.

So begins my ‘lost weekend’. Can’t wait to get the LMS set home and set it up. In the afternoon the two boys and I make a pilgrimage to Beatties of Holborn and stock up on more track and some rolling stock that’s in the sales. Back home again and from then on I resent any interruption.

Decide to make some positive moves on the
Small Harry
story. Go in to see Geoffrey Strachan as a cloudburst of hail hits London. Geoffrey’s honesty is something greatly to be valued and I keep forgetting he’s the Managing Director of a publisher, so openly does he dispense it.

I left him with the story.

Build a new railway layout.

This morning I waited half an hour at the Mornington Foot Clinic for Mr Owen to finish talking to the lady before me. Every word can be heard out in the ‘waiting area’ and I caught one memorable phrase … ‘If there’s one thing I
don’t
like, it’s an unshaven man.’ Much agreement from the lady patient.