Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (50 page)

Ring TJ, who has spent all morning on the phone and had no time to work. Put finishing touches to a peace speech, then drive down to Camberwell, via the picture-framers in Islington. Brief glimpse of the nightmare world of bottled-up traffic on the way through London. Unmoving lines of huge lorries in the drizzle. Dark, enormous, steaming, hissing, hostile and hugely out of scale with the buildings and streets they clog.

Anyway, though we didn’t expect such a thing to happen, we both become fired with enthusiasm over the Viking musical idea.

We shall now go away and read about the Vikings, and not try to do a pastiche of bad Hollywood films about Vikings, but work from an informed base – as with
Missionary
,
Brian
, etc. Ideas should come from the reading.

Then I drive up to Camden Institute where I deliver my five-minute piece on peace to open Peace Week there. A small but appreciative audience of middle-aged, grey-haired intellectuals, students, slightly dog-eared supporters of the cause and people who look a little mad.

Very content sitting in the sunshine reading tales of Harald ‘Blue Tooth’ Gormson and others. Vaguely aware of the presence of London out there – of friends to be called, lunches to be shared, books bought, projects discussed, cards sent to faraway places, but otherwise little to disturb my peace and contentment.

DO’B calls with a gloomy forecast for the survival of the ‘Pig’ film. His ‘people’ don’t think it will be commercial. Very difficult to sell. Still a TV film basically, and so on and so on.

DO’B calls again at 4.30 to tell me he’s had the meeting with Shivas and the project is definitely going ahead. ‘The Yorkshire Mafia’, as he calls Bennett and Mowbray (with Shivas an honorary member), will actually
be opening an account with HandMade this week. DO’B chides me over
Water
. ‘Why don’t you do commercial films for once, Michael!’ I want to say ‘Why don’t
you
do commercial films for once, Denis.’

Later in the evening I call George in Henley. Tells me that at the ‘Beatle Summit’ last week affairs and problems that had been dragging on unresolved were sorted in a day. Yoko had been (pause) ‘very nice’ (this followed by a chuckle) and the only problem had been Paul’s defensiveness for the first hour until he realised that the others weren’t ganging up on him after all.

André rings to tell me the good news that our
Meaning of Life
commercials have won Best Use of Comedy on a Commercial and Best Entertainment at the Radio Awards. The entire series of commercials received a commendation. André very chuffed as we beat Rhys Jones/Mel Smith’s Philips ads. When I think that we threw together the scripts almost on the spot, it’s even more remarkable.

TG arrives. Evidently Arnon Milchan has already done a 30 million dollar deal for TG’s next two pictures. They are to be
Baron Munchausen
parts I and II. And Twentieth Century Fox are
very
keen. So TG’s future looks very rosy. Quite rightly he has at last been appreciated as a film-maker of rare talent and accordingly he must be offered as much work as possible. I feel as I talk to Terry G that Terry J and I should both be in this same position, but we are, with the best will in the world, holding each other back.

Watch the latest American ‘sensation’ –
The Day After
. A TV film about the effects of nuclear war on the American Midwest.

In the hour after it finishes, Robert Kee, solemn and Solomonic, gravely adjudicates a discussion.

Most depressing of all is that, of all the David Owens, Denis Healeys and Robert McNamaras, no-one makes the simple promise that nuclear war is unthinkable and utterly appalling and therefore everything and anything that
can
be done to prevent it happening must be done and with all speed.

Go to bed profoundly depressed.

Finish [J. G. Farrell’s]
Troubles
on the train, as we wait at a signal check this side of Manningtree. Excellent book. It has really caught my imagination and involved me. Reminds me of Paul Scott, but a little less heavy on the history and stronger on the symbolism. Farrell, the author, died at 46. Tragically young, as they say.

Morning at the desk. No word from TJ, so after phone calls and writing of a few more cards, I have time to sit and work out strategy for the next projects. Time for some hard-headed realistic forward-planning of the sort that cheers up a neat, anally-retentive little list-keeper like myself no end.

Decide to go further with [my play]
The Weekend
– and have asked Douglas Rae
⁹⁶
if he will give me an opinion. I think I know what he’ll say, but I’d like a mainstream West End management opinion to see whether it’s worth bestirring myself on this one.

In the evening we go round to drinks with the Goldstones.

Tracey Ullman is introduced to me by Ruby Wax – whom I met at RL’s on Thanksgiving. I like Tracey U – she’s funny and quite sensible and, thank God, isn’t always manically funny. The TV companies wanted her to do sitcom, but she turned her nose up at that and felt she wanted to do film half-hours – ‘like female
Ripping Yarns
’, she says to me.

Peter Cook lurches in. His shirt tails pulled out from his trousers, his tie loosened and harbouring a neat deposit of cigarette ash on the top of the knot.

Once he has got a bead on me he teases me about my appearance on the front of the
Ham and High
this week (a report of my Peace Week opening speech at Camden Institute ten days ago, complete with rather smug photo of myself next to a peace banner). ‘Wassallthis bloody peace yeronnerabout?’ is directed at me from close spittle-throwing range.

My last glimpse of him is out in the street, a shambolic shaggy figure shouting after me ‘Well, if you ever get fed up with peace … !’

Book-signing at the Paperback Bookshop in Oxford.

At 3.15 I can thankfully cease to be on public display and walk slowly down to the station with Geoffrey S, who’s come up to escort me. We catch the 4.25 back to London. On the way I talk an awful lot about our films and specially about Paul Zimmerman’s Hitler film.
⁹⁷
Geoffrey is such a good sounding board.

I drive him up to Highbury and on the way back up a clogged and unfriendly Holloway Road I hear on the car radio of the news that a bomb has gone off amongst Christmas shoppers. It was outside Harrods and nine people are reported dead, scores injured.

The awful thing about such attacks is the increasing deadening, demoralising fact that there are people who take pride and pleasure in killing indiscriminately and there is nothing that can totally be done to prevent them achieving their ends. Grim stuff to come back to.

Leave the house at 10.15 for a Python group meeting – the first for over a year.

The meeting is good-natured. Arthur Young, McClelland Moores’ accounts are not only accepted and the accountants reappointed but, at TG’s suggestion, a motion is passed that a singing telegram should be sent round to tell them so.

Graham asks if he can vote by proxy and if so can he be his own proxy. John Cleese reveals that he may be Jewish. He also says his father had a nanny who had been kissed by Napoleon. I tell them that my ancestor had hidden Prince Charles in the oak tree after the battle of Worcester. To which EI came up with the ‘O’ Level maths question ‘How many royalists does it require to hide a king in an oak tree?’ Graham says he’s discovered family links with George Eliot. I am complimented on my
speech at the Lewis/Jones wedding and Eric is complimented on his outstandingly bushy beard.

Although a morning of recovery would have been a good thing, our house today promises to be invaded by Sam (paint), Ted (windows), Ricky (lights), Helena (vacuum cleaner), a window cleaner and Stuart (burglar alarm). Any large-scale invasion of our intimate little property always makes me twitchy – they take over, making me feel like an odd and eccentric man in the attic, who sits on a swivel chair all day booking restaurants and thoughtlessly going to the lavatory just when they’re working in it, on it or around it.

Into Covent Garden to meet Eric and Tania at a pub in Drury Lane. Eric reveals that [his play]
Pass the Butler
is doing marvellous business in Stockholm, like Python. Eric and I try to analyse this phenomenon and decide it can only be that the Swedes have no sense of humour of their own and have to import it.

Watch marvellous piece by Alan Plater about Orwell’s visits to the Isle of Jura and his battle to complete
1984
against the advance of TB. Ronald Pickup’s performance quite excellent. How he managed to keep the catarrhal rattle in the back of his throat I don’t know. It was as complete a portrait of another man as any actor could hope to achieve. Comparable with Ben Kingsley’s ‘Gandhi’.

Breakfast about 10.15 – can hear church bells ringing in Lismore Circus. Helen has to cook potatoes for the lunch at Mary’s. As we prepare to leave at 12.45, run into John Sergeant (Anne Alison’s brother and Oxford revue acquaintance), who is BBC Radio correspondent at Westminster.

He reckons that Willie Whitelaw’s wonderful ‘Willie-ism’ over Northern Ireland – ‘We must not pre-judge the past’ – ranks as a great unconscious profundity, and says that Margaret Thatcher loves publicity and is becoming smoother and smoother and more frighteningly competent at it. To the press after the Harrods bombing a week ago:
‘Where would you like me?’ ‘Would I look better here?’ ‘How will you be editing this?’ Etc, etc. Maybe that is in fact the only way to deal with the press, but Sergeant’s point is that Maggie is now becoming unduly preoccupied with presentation rather than substance.

To the Hayward Gallery.

Dufy’s work a celebration of light, colour and movement. Sea and sky and sporting ritual – regattas and race-courses figure large. Cumulative effect of his work is like opening a window onto the Mediterranean on a perfect summer’s day. His fabric designs are an eye-opener – all done 50 years ago, but seem absolutely up to date.

Drop in at the Portal Gallery and see Eric Lister. Like most of Bond Street, he’s empty of punters, but instantly into stories and showing me objets drôles as if we’d never stopped looking from the last time I came in. He shows me a device which incorporates a minimally inflated balloon which can be clipped onto the underneath of the shoe to give an impersonation of squeaky shoes.

Just before I leave, his friend, who has sat quietly at his desk, demonstrates a watch he’s been given for Christmas, whose face can unclip from the wrist and from which arms and legs can be extended, making it into a little stubby figure which can stand on the bedside table at night.

Up, before Helen, and let Sam J in (he’s now decorating No. 2), then go running – so feel quite perky by the time Roy arrives to take me to the studio. Am having my hair cut when De Niro appears – hot off the overnight plane from NYC, to prepare for his scene tomorrow in which he shoots me. He’s very quiet and, as is the way with people you admire inordinately, there’s very little to say.

De Niro goes away to practise abseiling.

The afternoon goes by and stretches into evening before I’m used. Go to the editing room and look at the first reel. My performance in the lobby is not good. Ian Holm and Jonathan impressive. Depressed for a while.

Quite quick run down through light, early-morning traffic to Croydon Power Station (built, I’m told by Robert De Niro later in the day, in 1948 and closed in 1980).

The Mercedes turns in off a works slip road and into a service road between 220-foot-tall cooling towers. Beside one of them stands the crane from which is suspended the steel cage from which Tuttle’s raiding party will descend.

For the first hour there is coffee and nothing to do but settle in our caravans. After an hour of desultory chatter we are called up to the set and for the first time and probably the last few times of my life, I enter a cooling tower. It’s like being at the bottom of the barrel of some giant cannon.

A long, narrow walkway leads from the side to a 15-foot-diameter platform in the centre of the tower. Rehearse and work out how I shall die, so that my stunt double knows what to do.

Lunch – in my caravan. TG, Bobbie De N, Jonathan and me. TG cross at lack of progress, mutters that it should have been done with models all
along. Talk turns to lavatory stories. TG recounts how he was peeing in the toilet of a smart little restaurant in France when he noticed a turd on the floor beside the bowl. Just at that moment there is a knock on the door – a queue has formed. How does our hero avoid being mistaken for the ill-aimed turd-dropper? Poor TG has no alternative but to come out looking as unconcerned as possible.

Am driven to the Selsdon Park Hotel, about 15 minutes away, where TG is overnighting as well.

Have a bath, then wander downstairs to wait for TG. The public rooms are furnished rather fussily, with heavy patterns, copper ornaments, much recent old-wood panelling – like endless Agatha Christie stage sets. Everything is expensive. My little single room (with good bathroom) is £51, a half-bottle of champagne is £10.25. And this is Croydon.

To bed at 11.30. Have fallen into a deep sleep almost as soon as I switch the light off when I’m woken by the incessant, jarring screech of a fire alarm. My room is almost vibrating with the noise.

A few minutes later the horrendous noise dies. With thudding heart I settle down to try and sleep, only to be woken by a telephone call reassuring me that it
was
a mistake. I wonder if they mean staying here in the first place.