Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (37 page)

TG comes round and we talk about
Brazil
. I feel that the story of Jill and Lowry takes forever to get off the ground and there is more observation of the tatty world of the future than plot development. Some repetition of good ideas, too. TG feels that Stoppard has softened it a bit, and I think he may be right. The characters talk without any edge. Their behaviour is observed with amused detachment rather than commitment. And the scale of
Brazil
is such that it cannot just be a
gentle story like
The Missionary
. TG films for much higher stakes. Still, many good moments, effects, surreal dream sequences, which will work.

Gather together my things for the first week of
Missionary
promotion, including sketches, bits of old speeches – anything that may help. Remember that Graham Chapman used to begin his US college appearances by asking the audience to shout abuse at him.

Landed in Washington in early evening. Dulles Airport, set in mellowing, wooded Virginia countryside, was unexpectedly quiet. I was paged at customs and given VIP treatment, rushed through and out into a waiting limousine by a girl called Sherry.

As we drove into Washington she showed me some of the ‘merchandising’. T-shirts with ‘The Missionary University Tour’ unexceptionally written on them. A polo-neck with ‘The Missionary’ and the words ‘Give Your Body To Save My Soul’ on.

At eight o’clock – one o’clock a.m. my time – I go into a press conference for college students. There are about 20 people there and Marvin Antonowsky sits in as well. Many of them have seen the movie and I’m told they laughed a lot at the showing, but one black student I spoke to didn’t think it would mean much to a black college audience.

Marvin seems well pleased, though, and likes what he calls ‘all the additions’. Over dinner – soft-shell crabs – he fishes for what I’m doing next. Suggests a re-make of
Kind Hearts and Coronets
. Confirmed that he didn’t like
Privates on Parade
. Says he finds Nichols’ work too black and cynical. But we have another of our easy, friendly, convivial meals. We never seem to be at a loss for things to chat about.

An idea occurred to me for the start of my proposed University of Maryland speech. Owing perhaps a little to memories of Edna Everage’s showmanship, it was that I should compose some lines of rather bad poetry in honour of the University of Maryland.

At 9.30 Sherry arrives to take me downstairs to talk to a reporter from a month-old daily newspaper
USA Today
. We have breakfast in Les Beaux Champs – ‘A French restaurant self-assured enough to serve American
wines’. Grapefruit, scrambled eggs and bacon, ignore the ‘Bakehouse Basket’.

The reporter saw the movie at the Washington showing last Friday. He himself liked it but did not enthuse, and he
was
worried by the big launch, multi-print treatment. He felt that Columbia will drop it like a hot potato if it doesn’t perform commercially.

To the campus of Maryland University.

The students take me round back passages and up fire escapes to a theatre where I am billed to speak. ‘Meet Michael Palin. Free.’ say the posters.

Inside the theatre are TV crews, photographers, a stage, a dais and a full house of 750 students (with some turned away, I hear). Seeing a brown paper bag I grab it, empty out its contents and enter the auditorium with it over my head. Two besuited young students say nice things in introduction and I’m given a scroll for making the world laugh and then a floppy, big soft toy turtle.

To Northwestern University, north of Chicago on the lakeside.

A picturesque, leafy campus looking out over Lake Michigan. I am to talk to a class on … ‘Acting Problems in Style-Comedy’ at the Theater and Interpretation Center. It sounds pretentious, but the people involved, particularly the professor – Bud Beyer – are very warm and friendly. All nervous and sweating in the 80° humidity. Many good words about my film and the ‘Great Railway Journey’, which has already been shown on PBS here more times than on the Beeb in England.

The University Chaplain makes a very funny and complimentary speech about myself and the ‘
Mish
’ and presents me with a stuffed wildcat. I read my poem and say goodbye.

To Columbia Pictures headquarters in a faceless office building in a half-completed plaza beside O’Hare Airport. I’m photographed with the girls and do my Prince Charles bit, shaking hands with everybody. I learn that they are very pleased with the exhibitor’s reaction in Chicago, Minneapolis and Milwaukee. ‘
Mish
’ will open in 14 theatres in the Chicago area – including two prime sites. Everyone seems very keen and hopeful.

Alarm call at 7.15, but I’ve been awake since seven, trying out lines for today’s poem. Southern Methodist University is not easy to rhyme.

A crowd of maybe 200 kids are gathered in the open air around a makeshift stage. I’m presented with a plaque for being ‘A Missionary for British Humor in the US’. Poor PA is a curse, but my poem in response goes down well. I feel like an old-style politician at the hustings – talking off the back of a truck. The audience is receptive and appreciative and after I have finished there follows a custard pie throwing contest, which I am to judge. Taken quite seriously by beefy male students (no women contestants), including one who delivers a custard pie on a motorbike, à la mediaeval tournament.

My first appointment of the day – a live interview at Station KQAK, the Quake. As I entered the limousine, Melanie [my publicity lady] chilled me to the marrow with the news that ‘Really crazy things are happening down there. Robin Williams has been there since six o’clock with some other improv comics and it’s just really crazy!’

Oh, God … Dear God, do I have to?

There was a bustle of excitement, then I was shown into the studio itself, which was densely packed with fans. They had nowhere to sit and clearly no provision had been made for their presence at all, but there they all were, like the crowd at one of Jesus’s miracles, squashed into this hot and airless room, gazing at their heroes – in this case Alex Bennett, a gentle, bespectacled DJ, Robin Williams, red-faced and driven with comic improvisation like a man exorcising some spirits, and a local comic, who had a neat moustache and was also working hard, though no match for Robin.

I was cheered on entry and shown to a place midway between these high-pressure comics and two microphones. ‘This is worse than the Queen’s bedroom,’ quipped I, helplessly … looking round at the sea of faces. Suddenly everyone, I realised, was staring at me, waiting for me to be witty, marvellous and funny. It was a nightmare come true – like some massive overdose of shyness aversion therapy.

Robin Williams was in his element, switching with incredible speed and dexterity into an ad-libbed playlet. Never at a loss for words, and
remarkably consistent. He held the show together. Jeremy, with the moustache, and myself, shared a microphone – there was no point in my sharing Robin’s. The humour was West Coast – brittle, topical, cruel, mocking, black, but with some wonderful flashes of fantasy. RW took the new film
Road Warrior
and turned it into ‘Rhodes Warrior’, the tale of a rogue Rhodes Scholar left alive on earth after the holocaust – ‘Tough, educated, he read his way through trouble’.

The worst moment was when I was asked to describe
The Missionary
. It sounded so leaden and mundane in the midst of all this sharp, hip humour – as if it were coming from another world. I was left helplessly asserting, in the silence that followed my dull little description, ‘It
is
funny …’

But the biggest test of the day is yet to come. My visit to the campus of San Francisco State, where Columbia, I’m later to learn, have been working very hard on my behalf.

To everyone’s relief, there is a crowd – estimated at over 1,000 – clustered in the bright sunshine around a makeshift stage. It’s San Francisco, though, and my ‘award’ this time is not to be presented by a nervous student or a well-meaning chaplain, but by – what else in SF – a comic.

My ‘introducer’ is Jane Dornacker, a big, busty lady, who wears her ‘Give Your Body To Save My Soul’ T-shirt quite spectacularly. But she does like to talk. It’s a fierce, competitive world, the world of improv, and once you’re up there and it’s going well, you stay. She is getting quite raunchy by now, with jokes about haemorrhoids being a pain in the ass and masturbation in San Quentin. I can see the organisers are getting twitchy because there are innumerable TV crews covering the event and there is precious little material they’ll be able to use. In fact one has given up altogether. Eventually Dornacker draws to a close and has to give me my award for ‘moral virtue’.

Read my poem, heavy on royal family jokes, which they love out here. Thank God for Michael Fagan.
⁷⁷

J Goldstone had rung to tell me of a private screening of
My Favourite Year
– the Peter O’Toole film comedy which has received such good
reviews in the US. I went along to the EMI Theatre in Wardour Street where, a few weeks ago, I was biting my fingernails showing
Missionary
to my friends.

Before I left I spoke to Sue Barton in New York, who cheered me no end with the news that
Cosmopolitan
had written a very good review of
The Missionary
. So it’s two against one so far. (
Newsweek
good,
Time
not so good.) Not a bad start.

My Favourite Year
was a lovely little film. A light piece of nostalgia for the 1950’s, based on Mel Brooks’s experience as a writer for Sid Caesar. For anyone’s who’s hosted
Saturday Night Live
, it had extra significance, being shot at NBC in 30 Rockefeller Plaza and being all about the problems of star guests on live shows.

It felt much the same weight as
The Missionary
. Gentle humour, laced with slapstick, enjoyment of characters as much as plot, and shot through with moments of pathos (beautifully handled by Peter O’Toole). Seeing it, and bearing in mind its early success in the high-energy world of US comedy, gave me as much hope for
The Missionary
as the news about
Cosmopolitan
. I left the cinema with the feeling that I hope people will have after
The Missionary
.

Up to Suffolk. Ma meets me in the new Metro. She doesn’t use first gear, as it’s rather difficult, and at the moment mistrusts most of the gearbox, but seems a lot safer than in the ageing 1100.

It’s warm and dry enough to sit out in the garden before lunch, and in the afternoon take Ma for a walk, in a friendly wind, out onto the cliffs beyond Covehithe.

Columbia call and ask if I could find out from Maggie S if she will come to the States at any time. Not really my job, but Maggie has a way of making things difficult for anyone to get decisions out of her.

Ring Maggie. She won’t say ‘yes’, but she does know that it helps the movie to appear in person and I think that for me she will do a couple of days in New York.

Home to start packing when TG arrives. He wants to talk about ‘MOL’. He saw it at an excellent showing (he says) on Tuesday. He felt weak
points were ‘Hendys’ (too long, but liked) and the tiger skin exchanges and Eric’s Waiter and Arthur Jarrett. But his real worry is his own piece. It will be 15 minutes at least and he wants to know my feelings about its inclusion or not in the main body of the film.

All this in our bedroom, with me in underpants checking how many pairs of socks I might need and Helen in curlers about to change.

We go off to see ‘A Star is Torn’ – a one-woman show by an Aussie lady called Robyn Archer, which is playing to packed houses at the Wyndhams. She sweeps briskly through a repertoire of impersonations of great popular lady singers of the twentieth century, many of whose qualification for inclusion in her act seem to be that they died of drug abuse round about the age of 40. I’m sure this cheers up my 40-year-old wife no end.

A strange feeling of unreality as I go back to
The Missionary
and its American opening. I’m sure I shall fall into the swim of things, but at the moment I just feel a deadening sense of weariness.

My scalp itches and I’ve forgotten to pack any toothpaste. My little kitchen and my family come to mind in sharp contrast to the world I shall inhabit for two weeks, and I know that I am coming near the end of my ability to lift up, inspire, charm, enthuse and everything else that has had to take me away from home so much this year.

Our 747 dips below Mount Rainier, tallest peak in the ‘contiguous’ USA, impressive and Paramount-like out of the southern windows, and we are on the ground in Seattle nearly an hour and a half late at about 3.30. The reward is a smooth, efficient, clean, empty terminal and the quickest entry ever into the US.

At 8.30 we leave for my first appointment – an appearance on a local morning TV show –
Northwest AM
.

Back to the hotel to talk to a Jewish girl from New Jersey. Her quick, nervous speech and voluble hand gestures are definitely un-Seattlian. Talk for a half-hour over coffee, then I’m led downstairs to a group of six, mostly young and studentish scribblers, waiting for a brunch interview.

We take off an hour late and run into a heavy concentration of rain clouds.

Wonderful dialogue behind. A fat woman with a dog in a basket.

‘Oh, my ears feel funny,’ she exclaims as we descend into LA.