Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (44 page)

Drive back uptown to a bar/restaurant in the theatre district for a drink with Richard Schickel, his wife and daughter. He officially rescinds his review of
The Missionary
, saying quite sportingly that he shouldn’t have dismissed it and anyway his wife had disagreed with his views right from the start. So that made me feel better and we now have quite a good relationship.

Off to Broadway Video, at Lorne’s invitation. It’s all looking very smart now. In a basement studio in the Brill Building Simon and Garfunkel are working on a new album, which has taken one and a half years already. They’re listening to a drummer, Eddie Gatt, doing over-dubs.

Paul greets me effusively (or as effusively as Paul ever could be), then goes back to careful concentration on the track. Art Garfunkel sits behind him and nods his great beaky head every now and then – ‘
That’s
good’ – but Simon is really in control. Art passes some coke on the end of a penknife. I decline, much to Lorne’s comic disapproval.

Down to another ABC studio to record an interview with a man whose extravagant name – Regis Philbin – denies his very regular appearance. We do ten very successful minutes. The producer of this new show is Bob Shanks – the man who six years ago was responsible for the butchering of the six Python TV shows which took us to court and eventually won us custody of the shows. He looks older and more unkempt. Quite shockingly different from the trim, smooth executive with nary a hair out of place whom we fought at the Federal Court House.

He jokes about it as we shake hands. ‘We met in court … ’. Really he’s done us a lot of good in the end and it’s a curious coincidence that less than 12 hours before meeting Shanks again, I heard from Ron Devillier that we have sold the Python TV shows to PBS for a fee of at least a million dollars for two years.

Helen has not slept much and is groaning in pain at eight o’clock on this Easter morning.

Throughout the morning she is in great pain and discomfort. Cheerful Doctor Rea arrives at midday, quips about my appearance on the back of buses, examines Helen and takes a sample. He has no bottles, so I have to run downstairs and fetch one of Helen’s marmalade jars.

The doctor takes a quick look at Helen’s specimen, holds it up to the light for all Oak Village to see and pronounces it like ‘a rich Madeira’. He says Helen has all the symptoms of pyelitis – an infection of the tubes leading from the kidneys to the urinary tract. He prescribes some pills, which I rush out to Belsize Park to fetch from a Welsh chemist, who’s also seen me on the back of the buses.

Collect the Sunday papers and try to put off further rehearsal for the Stop Sizewell ‘B’ concert as long as possible.
⁸³
I feel an enormous disinclination to appear on stage tonight. A wave of weariness which I feel sure is mental
more than physical. I have been so much in the public eye over the last year or so – and each day, with very few exceptions, I’ve been required to smile brightly, chat optimistically and generally project constantly, when all I really want to do is to disappear from sight for a while.

Dinner at Mary’s is a welcome break – very jolly, with Granny G declaring that she has grown cannabis in her garden … ‘And I’m growing more this year’ – but I have to leave after an hour and drive down to the Apollo Victoria for the call at 3.30. The theatre is huge and it takes me half an hour to work out a way through the labyrinth of tunnels to our dressing room, which TJ and I are sharing with Neil Innes and Pete Capaldi (one of the stars of
Local Hero
).

At four o’clock the cast is summonsed to the foyer to hear the running order. Various bands – Darts, UB40, Madness – and a strong selection of comedy groups – Rik Mayall and the Young Ones, National Theatre of Brent, as well as Neil and Julie Covington and Pamela Stephenson. TJ is told that they couldn’t do an explosion, so he decided to cut ‘Never Be Rude to an Arab’.

Then a long, long wait whilst UB40 monopolise the stage, which is filled with a vast and forbidding array of speakers, amps, wires, leads, plugs and sockets which make Sizewell ‘B’ look as dangerous as the Faraway Tree. Backstage is a no-man’s land of bewilderment and confusion.

Jeanette Charles – the Queen’s lookalike – arrives in our dressing room about seven to add yet another bizarre element to an already lunatic situation.

The curtain doesn’t go up at 7.30 as the bands are still rehearsing. Jeanette C, now totally transformed physically and mentally into the Royal Person, protests vigorously at the delay – ‘I have to go to a Bar-Mitzvah … ’ she announces imperiously to some desperate and confused dis-organiser. ‘When quarter to eight comes I must go like a bat out of hell to Chigwell.’ Very Joe Orton.

Begin writing new screenplay. Rather than spend days or weeks on elaborate research or agonising over a subject, I decide to ride straight in on the ‘Explorers’ idea which came to me about four months ago.

To dinner with Graham and David. Was supposed to be with TJ as well, but he rang this morning, having had Creosotic eruptions during
the night, to cancel. Take GC to Langan’s Brasserie. He’s half an hour late. Still, I enjoy sipping a malt whisky at the bar and watching caricatures of rich people entering. Feel like I’m watching a parade of the people George Grosz used to draw.

GC looks a bit drawn and haggard and, as always, has the slightly distracted air of, as TJ put it, ‘someone who wants to be somewhere else’. Great praise for Peter Cook for keeping everyone happy in Mexico and Eric for being ‘divine’ (according to David). GC goes back to the US for
Yellowbeard
sneak previews this week. He has reached the stage of not knowing whether anything is working any more.

To the BBC to discuss further my
Comic Roots
piece with Tony Laryea, my director.

The headquarters of
Open Door
is, ironically, almost impossible to find. I drive past it several times and in the end have to ask directions at Lime Grove.

Talk to Tony in an office full of clutter and overflowing out-trays. Very John le Carré. I tell him my thoughts about the structure of the piece. He is a little taken aback when I suggest David Frost as someone to interview. But he was seminal to the Palin career. It’s taking further shape and looks like being a very rich programme. At least an hour’s worth at the moment.

Talk to a Dutch journalist for an hour. He has 38 questions.

John Goldstone makes one further attempt to persuade me to go to Cannes – using a free ticket for Helen as bait. I can’t, I’m going to Newcastle. Suggest Helen goes with one of the others!

I embark on mass picture-hanging and clearing up in the garden until Gilliam arrives and we talk about the state of the world for an hour and a half. He
is
going to Cannes, but isn’t going to wear a dinner jacket for the special evening showing. Says he’ll only go if the dinner jacket very obviously has vomit all over it.

He says that he misses working in the flexible Python way and that Tom Stoppard is much more of a professional writer, wanting to be sure he’s being paid before doing rewrites … and ‘Stoppard’s stuff is so hard to rewrite’. But they are at the casting and location-hunting stage.

J Cleese rings to ask us to dinner. He says he’s writing his own thing and would I play a man with a stutter?

At 2.15 two young men, Edward Whitley and another whose name I forget, come to interview me for a book on Oxford. They were meant to come last Friday, but their car had broken down. They’re quite pleasant, rather plummy-voiced Oxfordians. I expect from the more comfortably-off classes.

But their interviewing is less comfortable. They are aggressive and rather impatient (nothing new with students), but with an added and more sinister tone – it is as if they have made their mind up about Oxford and what it was like in my time, and nothing I say would really change what they want to think. Whitley, especially, is a clumsy, gauche questioner.

In short, what I had hoped would be a pleasant chance to recall what Oxford was to me, turns into an inquisition. I pour them coffee and try to cope with all their questions, but there is such a humourless, sour feeling emanating from Whitley that it isn’t easy.

I know I have another one-hour interview to go to at 3.15, as do they, and when, at 3.20, they turn their probing eye on to
The Missionary
and begin, in rather measured, well-rounded tones to pull it to pieces, I quite simply run out of patience with their hostile cleverness and leave the house.

On to a Python ‘
MOL
’ meeting with the two Terrys and John G and Anne. TJ and I put together a nice little 40-second radio ad and it’s quite a jolly session. Goldstone says ‘
MOL
’ is over 10 million gross in the US, but we need 40 million gross to start making money.

Out to Heathrow about one o’clock. Time for a coffee, then onto a Super One-Eleven to Oslo. At three o’clock UK time, four o’clock Norwegian, we’re over the mainland of Norway and flying across a chill and desolate snowscape of forests and frozen lakes and finally into Oslo itself.

A man comes out to welcome the flight on a bicycle. We leave the plane and down to the terminal through holes in the tarmac. John Jacobsen,
⁸⁴
thin, bearded, with his odd, ironic gaze, meets me and drives me into the centre of town and the Continental Hotel. Pleasant, local feel to it and a large room overlooking the main street of the town.

Don my suit and tie and am taken at eight o’clock to the Continental Hotel dining room (the best restaurant in Oslo, I’m told). Here I meet my hosts for tonight, the two who run all the cinemas of Oslo – for, like alcohol retailing, cinema exhibition is here a municipal monopoly. The dark lady with a sad, Munch-like face is Ingeborg. The middle-aged, friendly, unassuming man is Eivind. ‘You are not so high … ’ begins the dark and Garbo-esque Ingeborg, ‘as on the screen.’

To a restaurant overlooking the city for a late lunch with Jahn Teigen, the Norwegian comedian/singer/composer, who became even more of a national hero when he returned from the Eurovision Song Contest two years ago without a single point.

He’s a tremendous Python fan, but a very intelligent one too and I like him enormously. Having a lunch together is a real relaxation from the usual round of slightly forced politenesses which these trips are all about. He’s making a film about King Olaf, the tenth-century Norwegian hero. His concerts sell out all over the country and he’s clearly the biggest fish in this quite lucrative pond.

Forty years old. Feel tempted to write some pertinent remarks about The Meaning Of It All – a mid-life, half-term report on Michael P. But there isn’t much to say except I feel I’m still going – and going very hard and quite fast – and the pace of life and experience doesn’t seem to show any sign of flagging.

I feel that I’ve entered, and am now firmly embarked on, a third 18-year ‘section’. The first 18 were my childhood, the next 18 my preparation and apprenticeship and now, for better or worse, I
am
established. If I died tomorrow I would have an obituary and all those things.

The very fact that Rachel should creep round the door of our room at eight o’clock, full of excitement, to tell me that my birthday was announced, over my picture, on BBC Breakfast TV, shows what status I have had thrust upon me. I have the feeling that, as far as the public is
concerned, I am now their Michael Palin and they are quite happy for me to remain their Michael Palin for the rest of my (and their) life.

So here I am. Healthy and wealthy and quite wise, but I can stay and sit comfortably or I can move on and undertake more risks as a writer and performer. Of course I
shall
go on, but, as another day of writing my ‘new film’ recedes and disappears, I realise that it won’t be easy. And I should perhaps stop expecting it to be.

Running on the Heath this morning, pounding away the effects of a poor, anxious night’s sleep, my mind clears as my body relaxes and I resolve to extricate myself from some of the many commitments in which I have become entangled over the years.

This morning Clive Landa rang from Shepperton. Clive tells me that Lee Brothers have made a £2 million offer for the studio and two property companies are also anxious to buy it (and knock it down, of course). I feel that all my efforts over the years have counted for very little – and, to be honest, I haven’t been asked to contribute a great deal of time and effort anyway. So I think I shall proffer my resignation as soon as possible.
⁸⁵

The crucial problem over the next months is whether or not I shall have time to write a screenplay by August. It’s clear that
Comic Roots
will take up at least four weeks and the ever-increasing demands of publicity will devour much of the rest. Unthinkable though it might seem, I feel strongly that I must extract myself from
Comic Roots
. I shouldn’t be spending four weeks on my past, when I’d rather be spending it on my future.

I open the Camden Institute Playgroup Fete.

I spend three-quarters of an hour ‘being a celebrity’ and trying to avoid a persistent mad camerawoman who wants me to do something ‘goofy’ for the
Camden Journal
. And all the time I’m doing this public smiling I’m inwardly trying to prepare myself for my next confrontation – with Tony Laryea over
Comic Roots
.

We talk upstairs in my workroom. I put to him, unequivocally, all the problems I foresee and ask if there is any way I can get out of doing the programme. Tony uses no moral blackmail, nor emotional entreaties either; he says that if we don’t do it now we will never do it and, although there was theoretically time to find a replacement for me, he obviously doesn’t want to. He is understanding of my problem and we end up going through the schedule cutting my time spent to its finest.