Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (42 page)

Breakfast in a cavernous dining room of immense size, furnished in a sort of European hybrid manner – a cross between Disneyland and Versailles, as my travelling companion describes it.

About nine we leave for the town. Outside the hotel Omar Sharif is learning his lines beside a row of parked cars.

We walk through the back streets of Jaipur. The Indians, unlike the Africans, don’t seem to mind a bit having their photographs taken – in fact they arrange themselves in rather decorative poses and leave their names and addresses with you afterwards if it’s been a particularly good one.

We return to the Rambagh Palace, who confirm that we have no rooms for the night. Indian Airlines’ flights to Udaipur are booked and there is no chance of us getting on the overnight train because it comes from Delhi and is bound to be full.

We are recognised. The [
Far Pavilions
] director turns out to be Peter Duffel. He’s a softer Lindsay Anderson lookalike. Amy Irving, his leading lady, asks to be introduced, though it turns out I’d met her briefly at Lee Studios when she was filming
Yentl
. She hears of TG’s and my plight and offers one of the spare beds in her room for the night should we be desperate!

Then Vishnu comes into our lives. Vishnu is older and looks a little wiser than the average run of motor-rickshaw drivers and he it is who takes us to the bus station to try and book on the overnight ‘de-luxe’ bus.

After watching their heads shake negatively for ten minutes I begin to give up, but eventually Vishnu is summoned into a dark corner and within minutes he’s back, trying to restrain a proud little smile. Money exchanges hands and we are on the de-luxe bus to Udaipur.

When we see the de-luxe bus, we are somewhat taken aback. Our seats are right at the front with a partition little more than two foot six inches in front of us. The seats don’t recline and the journey time is nine hours.

Stop at 3.30. Realise, as we pile out into the clear and pleasant night air, that I’m rather enjoying the journey – it’s not an ordeal at all. There’s something very calming about being in India. They don’t fight and fluster and bite their nails and moan and complain and it makes for a very unstressful atmosphere. No toilets at this stop – so just a pee in the darkness and a cup of sweet tea. Enjoy the understated feeling of camaraderie amongst the passengers, of which we are the only two whites.

It’s a clear, bright day and after breakfast TG and I are off up to the City Palace. Another enormous labyrinth of rooms, stairs and temples. It was lived in not long ago and has a rather sad museum with old Rolls Royces, mangy stuffed bears, many beautiful paintings of tiger and elephant hunts and life-sized cardboard cut-outs of the Maharajahs, which are quite a shock.

Sit in my room with a Herbert’s lager and watch the light fading on the shore and feel very peaceful. TG and I eat at the hotel, then have a
last drink out beside the pool in the courtyard which is all lit up. We’re the only ones to use it.

I’m at the airport even before the staff… they’re just unlocking the doors. So I’m first at the check-in counter. A small, rotund, self-important little man eventually surveys my ticket and pushes it aside. ‘Only OK passengers now, please.’ My jaw must have dropped visibly, for he continues ‘You are only wait-listed, please wait until the aircraft comes in.’

Suddenly I feel how far Udaipur is from anywhere else. Times, figures, estimates click round in my head, but no comforting alternative presents itself. But hope brightens as the plane is obviously emptier than I’ve expected and at last, with as little emotion as he’d turned me away, he takes my ticket, scribbles across it, and hands me a boarding card.

Arrive at the Imperial, to find a telegram giving the first weekend’s
Missionary
figures. Sydney outstanding, Melbourne disappointing and Adelaide very good! Late lunch at the Imperial. For the sake of
Ripping Yarns
and
The Missionary
, in which characters were always eating it, I choose a plate of kedgeree, which is superb, and a bottle of Golden Eagle beer.

Up at 8.15. The children rush upstairs to tell us, as we are dressing briskly in freezing bedroom, that John Cleese is on TV in his pyjamas. It’s true. He’s the star showbiz guest on this, the first programme of TV-AM – another new TV company started by David Frost and the second supplier of breakfast programmes to have started this year.

TJ rings. He’s just back from a lightning Concorde trip to the US for
Meaning of Life
previews. Two showings in Yonkers went so badly that TJ and JG didn’t even bother to look at the cards. An audience of young (15-22) cinema-goers predominantly. Eighty walk-outs.

TJ’s spirits restored by a showing in Manhattan which was very well received. As often happens under pressure, some sensible cuts have been made quite quickly – ‘Luther’ is gone and much of the ‘Hendys’ too. The film sounds trimmer. Universal, as a result of these last showings, are definitely going ahead on March 25th, but with a limited release – probably even less than
The Missionary
.

At 12.30 call John Hartman in Sydney –
The Missionary
is evidently No. 3 in the country. The good news is that attendances were up everywhere in the second week.

On the way to Ipswich I complete the last few pages of ‘
Anna K
’ – the book that has been my friend and guardian throughout Kenya, South Africa, Australia and India. Find the last few chapters – Levin discovers The Meaning of Life – rather comforting. I resolve to live my life better and not get angry with people any more.

Very cold still – getting up is not fun. But I sleep on this morning very easily, feeling that only now have I readjusted and caught up on my sleep after the World Tour. The builders arrive and start digging foundations for the extension to No. 2.

As Cleese is coming to dinner tonight, I feel I must see
Privates on Parade
, my HandMade stablemate. It’s on at the Classic Hampstead, so I go to the 3.35 showing. The ‘conversion’ of the Classic to a three-screen complex has been so brutal that the Screen One has been set on a new level halfway up the old auditorium. Even the old wall decorations have been left, severed, as a reminder of the modest but homely theatre it once was. A long, flat, empty space extends between audience, who number 15 this afternoon, and screen. But it’s in focus and the sound is clear, so I have to be thankful for that.

The concert party numbers are well done and, as they were at the core of the stage success, are performed with panache and attractive skill by Denis Quilley and S Jones and others. Cleese and Michael Elphick are impressive at first, but gradually the film is dragged down. Relationships are hinted at, briefly consummated, then dropped just as they might have been getting interesting and Cleesey becomes saddled with the unenviable task of providing comedy as a palliative for all the floundering ‘serious’ realities of war at the end.

He ends up with a desperate silly walk in the closing credits – as if finally confirming that the film is supposed to be a comedy, despite the balls being shot off, etc, etc.

To Duke’s Hotel to meet Mike Ewin – HandMade’s distribution man since December. Short, stocky, homely figure with a respectable suit. He does come up with one or two classic remarks for a film distributor, particularly his cheerful admission that he hasn’t seen the film … ‘But, you know, Michael, I don’t think it’s really necessary to see a film to know what sort of film it is.’

Walk through St James’s Square and into the Haymarket to look at our launch theatre and meet the manager.

The manager, Brian Rami, is quite a character. Youngish, aggressive, Greek Cypriot I should imagine. He is a theatre success story – taking tickets in Hackney two or three years ago, he’s won Classic’s Manager of the Year award. He briskly goes into the attack with Ray [Cooper] and myself, asking where our posters are and where the trailer and photo displays are, as he could have been playing them for the last week. ‘Good man,’ I say, in response to his enthusiasm. ‘Don’t “good man” me,’ he replies sharply, ‘… just give me the goods.’

Snow is beginning to fall quite thickly as Ray and I enter the scarlet and black world of The Hutton Company, but, as the
Sun
might say, we were soon seeing red of a different kind. The complications with the poster’s artwork, combined with the time it will take London Transport to hang them, make it now likely that the posters will not appear until the 1st of March, two days before the film opens.

I am quite unable to control my anger and frustration. Colin MacGregor [who’s in charge of our campaign], in his languid public-school manner, tries his best to calm things down, but I’m afraid there’s no stopping me. Silence and heads hung everywhere.

Today Colin MacGregor informs me that London Transport have agreed to start displaying posters on Underground and buses from February 18th – two weeks earlier than yesterday’s date – and that with a bit of luck they can arrange to have poster artwork completed by the weekend. I hate to say it, but violence does seem to work – even if it’s only the violence of my opinion.

To Mel Calman’s gallery at 12.30. We talk of ads, posters and the lack of good design. More positively we talk over the idea of opening a cinema in Covent Garden. It’s something I’ve heard mentioned elsewhere, but somehow, this being a Monday lunchtime and the start of a week, Mel imbues me with great enthusiasm for the idea and, as I walk back to the car, I feel all the elation of one who has just acquired a cinema in Covent Garden.

To Bertorelli’s, where a researcher for the Time Rice (Freudian slip), Tim Rice Show on Wednesday is taking me to lunch. Pre-interview interviews seem to be all the rage now. It’s a very bad habit imported from America. So I talk for an hour or so to this keen, rather aggressive Scots girl, who asks me dreadful questions like ‘Does comedy have a comic significance?’ ‘Is comedy a moral force on the world stage?’ I get very twitchy about three o’clock, when she still has ten questions left to ask.

I drive over to Lime Grove at seven o’clock for an appearance on
Sunday Night
. Into the quaintly-termed ‘hospitality room’, where I’m offered some wine from a bottle they keep on the window sill outside.

We record about a quarter to eight. Eric Robson, who did one of the ‘Great Railway Journeys’, is the presenter – a solid, dependable, likeable man. As the credits roll and the contents of the show reveal filmed reports on how Christianity is coping in the poverty-stricken conditions of South America,
The Missionary
seems embarrassingly frivolous.

The Dean of St Paul’s, another interviewee, smiles a little uncertainly at me, as the story of the film is being explained by their resident reviewer – himself a clergyman. His review of the film is not awfully good. He thinks it ‘a 50-minute television programme blown up to 90 minutes’, ‘not very serious’, ‘an adolescent fantasy’, etc, etc. ‘My fantasies are much more grown-up,’ he ends. They do drop themselves in it, these people.

The trouble is, as this is a religious programme,
The Missionary
is treated, out of perspective I think, as a carefully thought-out comment on the church. When he accuses the satire of being rather limp and safe, I counter by saying that the church gets the satire it deserves. Feel a few
frissons cross the studio as I say this and hope the Dean of St Paul’s doesn’t mind.

Bad news comes in early evening when Ray rings to say that the trailer has hit fresh, and quite unexpected, snags in the shape of the film censor, who has refused to grant our trailers anything less than an ‘X’ unless we remove mention of the word ‘prostitutes’ and cut a sequence in which I say ‘I was just telling Emmeline how relatively unimportant sex is’, despite the fact that he has given both these lines clearance for any audience over 15. The ridiculous thing is that he will allow us to replace ‘prostitutes’ with ‘fallen women’. The mind boggles.

Good news of the day is that Maggie Smith has agreed to come to the press screening and may even appear on
Terry Wogan
.

But the day’s excitements are not over. At home, as Helen is getting ready for another evening’s badminton and the spaghetti’s boiling away on the hob, Mel Calman calls to tell me that à propos our St Valentine’s Day enthusiasms for a cinema in Covent Garden, he has heard of a building for sale in Neal’s Yard! It’s No. 2, has a salad bar on the ground floor, room for a gallery and coffee bar on the first, an acupuncturist on the second and a self-contained flat on the top. Cost £275,000. I’m very keen. Keen to buy in such a special spot as Neal’s Yard and keen to help Mel C and the Workshop. Watch this space!

Stay up until 1.15 to watch the Bermondsey by-election, the culmination of a particularly vicious and intolerant campaign against Peter Tatchell. The Alliance Party are crowing. Labour
do
seem to be in quite serious trouble.

Arrive at TV-AM’s still-unfinished studios in Camden Town. Bright, light, high-tech building decorated in the Very Silly Style, with representations of pagodas and African jungles. It’s like one huge Breakfast TV set.

I’m on talking about
The Missionary
. Parky likes it. Calls it ‘an
important film’, too, and shows a clip. They give a number on which viewers can call me with any questions. Over 200 questions come in, and they’re all very excited at TV-AM as it’s the largest number of phone calls for anyone they’ve ever had. I wish George Harrison ‘Happy Birthday’ on air – even though he’s incommunicado in Hawaii. But I am wearing the Missoni sweater he gave me and at least ten of the calls are about this.