Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (65 page)

TJ carries an emotional involvement into everything he does, finding it difficult not to say everything he wants to say about the world in each script, which is why he isn’t so good on characters. He won’t stand back and allow them to have a life of their own.

Feel somewhat lethargic and lacking in clear-headed energy for today’s vital decisions on ‘A Consuming Passion’

Clearly TJ doesn’t want to have anything more to do with the rewrites as he has pressing problems of his own – ‘Erik’ and ‘Nicobobinus’ [his children’s story]
foremost – so I suggest that I write a third draft, aiming to complete in relatively unrushed time – by Christmas or late November if possible. This decision lightens both our minds. The only factor which could affect it is quite a surprise – Amanda Schiff rings to say she’s being made redundant by Goldcrest. Sandy L will ring. Where all this leaves us I don’t know.

Meet Sandy L at the Flask. The meeting becomes like a Python sketch when a very chatty young man in a suit becomes irrevocably involved in our discussions after recognising me and then TJ.

So, whilst Sandy explains, lengthily and frankly, the politics at Goldcrest which have led to his resignation, he has occasionally to answer questions like ‘What do you do?’, ‘What
is
a producer?’, and so on. Sandy is marvellous and plays it most courteously and unpatronisingly and patiently. But it is rather like having one of our own creations – a Pither or a Charlie Legs – incarnated before our very eyes.

To Chelsea by cab to be witnesses at Richard and Felice’s nuptials.

The Chelsea Register Office is decorated rather like one of those ‘no questions asked’ hotels where you go when you’re not married. There’s a lot of Indian restaurant flock wallpaper and cheap chandeliers. As far as I can see there are no fresh flowers. You probably have to order those yourself. The short speech from the Registrar binds Richard and Felice to eternal faithfulness, which Richard thinks is ‘a bit much’.

We drive back to their house and kill time for a couple of hours, which is an odd way to carry on on a precious weekday working morning, but a rather satisfactory change of pace. Time to take in all the wonders of Richard’s interior decoration – his kettle which makes the noise of an American train whistle when it boils, his compact disc set-up, his several thousand pounds’ worth of bicycle. He asks me if I’ll come on a cycling and railway trip through Java in November. Apart from my Belfast commitments, I think I wouldn’t know how to work his bicycles.

At eight walk up to William Ellis for a meeting to hear the local MP for the school, Geoffrey Finsberg, talk about the eight-month-old dispute between teachers and Sir Keith Joseph. Finsberg talks for a half-hour with the soulless precision of a politician who has been too well briefed. He concentrates almost entirely on the teachers’ rejection of a new pay and promotion package three days ago and their refusal to go to arbitration.

No-one makes the pithy point that if this package is so wonderful, why wasn’t it offered eight months ago? The questions from the floor come, for the first half-hour, from articulate, organised opposition, whether Labour Party members or teachers, and Finsberg quite happily deals with them. They’re his own breed after all.

Driven by fear that he will go away with the impression (that he so wants to go away with) that we parents are being innocently led to the slaughter by a militant, unionised minority, I stand up at the end and ask him why he thinks Sir Keith Joseph is so generally and universally disliked and mistrusted by teachers of all shades of opinion. He slips out of the question as smoothly as he slips out of the meeting five minutes later.

The day of the Great Move. Everything is on schedule. Angela has been up there for a day already.

The weather has made everything much more like a celebration, less like a departure. The sun is warm and bright and generous and makes the spreading panorama from the windows of Flat 2, Sunset House, a very adequate replacement for the cosier, more reassuring cornfields on either side of Croft Cottage.

The Herberts moon about until about half past eight or nine, then Veryan, who has been hanging mirrors, screwing in toilet rolls and coat hooks, Marcus, who’s been telling me all about his recent trip to Burma and Thailand and Malaysia, as I stack books and shelves, and Camilla all embark for Sudbury, after we’ve christened the neat home with Mumm Cordon Rouge.

After Ma goes to bed I walk out for a bit to get a feel of the location of the new home. The night air is moist and still and vaporous. I follow a bright arc light and the sound of rhythmic thuds to a wall bordering the Common. Sounds like night filming. I peer over a flint wall to see, beyond
a smouldering bonfire, a group playing floodlit croquet on a trimly-kept lawn. A good enough image on which to retire.

Retrace my steps through the wet grass to my mother’s new home. Angela and I share a room. She reads. I fall asleep.

Sleep very soundly – a good omen for the future. Wake about 8.30. Find Granny downstairs amidst the debris of the half-unpacked kitchen. Apart from her early morning coughs, she seems remarkably unruffled by the whole thing – she’s faring much better than her children.

Spend the morning unpacking and positioning furniture. Mrs Haythornthwaite asks us across the landing to No. 3 for a drink. Despite a plummy accent and the confident bearing of one long used to the company of ‘professional’ people, she is bright and amusing and down-to-earth and very long-suffering, but without a trace of self-pity.

Married three years ago, for the second time, to an old soldier turned farmer who suddenly had a stroke and is at present confined to chair and stick and moves stiffly.

But he is alert and funny and likes a midday drink – legacy of the army, she says. Mother becomes quite flirty with the old man, despite being about 15 years his senior.

Angela and I drive over to Croft Cottage. The wine has wrought its usual havoc upon my energies and vacuuming the whole house is quite a push.

After an hour or so of cleaning, we leave Croft Cottage for the last time. I still cannot feel sentimental about it – but it was only the second house my mother lived in, in nearly 50 years. It looks good today, I feel we’re passing on something quite special, not really losing it.

Up to Highgate for lunch with Graham C. He and David and John T and Towser and Harry
¹¹⁹
are all moving down to Maidstone next week to a new house in the country. It’s a seventeenth-century house with additions including an indoor swimming pool. Graham seems continually
hard-up and paying out huge bills to builders – but he does drive Aston Martins and likes his house to have a pool and a gym.

Graham is a bit twitchy and unrelaxed to start with, but expands during the meal. We talk diet. He’s very keen on the low-cholesterol, low-fat diet, and takes it far more seriously than me – with regular blood tests, etc. I suppose this is the price you pay for being a doctor and knowing so much more about what’s happening inside you.

He seems to have no immediate work lined up. Still looking for alternative funds for [his film project] ‘Ditto’ after Paramount backed out.

Bid goodbye to GC and to his association with Highgate, the Angel pub, dinner parties with amazing food and eccentric service, the house where I first met Ray Cooper, and so on …

Packed up both cars, then up to Abbotsley for lunch.

Its conker time and I went with Rachel into the church graveyard and we soon filled a small bag full. Sign of the times is that the boys, who used to love to collect conkers, hardly appeared all afternoon. Both were working away at homework.

Looked into St Margaret’s Church which had been decorated for the harvest festival. On the altar was a loaf of bread, a glass of water and a pint of red-top. The Redundant Churches Fund, who saved this church from rotting the last ten years, have done a very careful job of preservation and restoration. Took Rachel in and for once I could show her what the church almost looked like when we were married. If it decayed so rapidly in the 15 years after our wedding, how on earth has it survived since the thirteenth century?

Sam Goldwyn rings to find out what’s going on with ‘A Consuming Passion’. I have to trot out the same tale of disillusion which I’ve already given Sandy (twice) and Amanda Schiff, but no-one seems to tell anybody else, which leads me to have some fears over who is actually claiming the project.

Sam G is very keen. He would fly over tomorrow if it would help strengthen our resolve. He reiterates his point about the dearth of good
comedy. I tell him that we’ll decide one way or other by the end of October.

A day (almost) to myself. Run at lunchtime and then complete my second ‘Cyril’ story, in the process of which I come up with a nice idea of a man whose moustache has a life of its own.

Wake at twenty past five. Feel quite rested, despite less than five hours’ sleep. Arrive at the BBC about an hour later. Usual disorienting walk along anonymous and labyrinthine corridors. Last time I was here Mrs Gandhi died. This morning it’s Yul Brynner (and will, later in the day, be Orson Welles), whose demise doesn’t disrupt the programme as drastically as the late Indira.

Frank Bough reads limericks to a bleary audience at seven o’clock, and reads them very well. I make various appearances throughout, the last being with Lance Percival and the man who runs Battersea Dogs’ Home (either he or one of his dogs farts silently but fiercely on air while sitting next to me) and Tony Ross, who is doing some on-the-spot illustrations. I can’t think how Bough survives – I feel I’ve done a day’s work by 9.15.

To Pebble Mill. A 25-minute radio interview, then preparation for the one o’clock TV show.

I appear first of all in a kilt with my foot in a bucket, reciting a limerick about [Bob] Langley [the presenter]. Ben Kingsley is the other main guest – hot from
Othello
at Stratford. I sign a book for his son Edmund – ‘as in Kean’.

Then to Leeds.

Appear live on
Calendar
. The autocue has one of my limericks printed up wrong – instead of a lady from Louth with a lisp they’ve put up ‘A lady from Louth with a limp’.

On to the Hyde Park Picture House – the characterful little pre-First War cinema on the corner which is running a Michael Palin week.
The
Missionary
and
The Dress
tonight, as well as two personal appearances by me. Jeff Thompson, the manager, who runs the place for love rather than money, says he could have sold the house three times over tonight, which is good for the ego.

To Shrewsbury and park near the Kingsland Bridge (now a 5p toll) beside St Chad’s and walk into the Quarry and look up at the schools sat on the hill. The long, red-brick rectangle in early Victorian workhouse style unchanged, as is the steep slope below it whose zig-zag path I know so well from rowing days.

I go to see Rigg’s Hall. Much of the freedom which I had to wait until university for is now available here – single-occupancy study/bedrooms for the sixth-formers, girl visitors, a much more tolerant attitude to the school dress.

I walk upstairs, on my own, and look into the bedroom I first occupied in May 1957. The room is almost the same, the iron bed-frame is almost certainly the same. Duvets are the only sign of the times. Try to remember the complicated feelings I had in that same room on my fourteenth birthday – my third or fourth day at Shrewsbury. Pride and loneliness, anticipation and expectation and aching home-sickness. A formative room, and now enshrined in
East of Ipswich
! The power of the writer! Or perhaps the scourge of the writer – to have to remember, to have to note and identify and record every damn thing.

At 5.15 I pay a last call to the school buildings, say my farewells and walk out of the Moss gates. It’s beginning to get dark and there is a still, misty, mustiness over the site. It was on evenings like these that I would, in my last term, October ’61, make my way to a secluded spot and there light up a Capstan and feel, at last, truly grown up.

To a meal at the Gay Hussar with Barry Cryer and Alan Bennett. A sort of ‘Three Yorkshiremen’ sketch. We’re an oddly-matched little trio, but the effect of three keen senses of humour keeps us going. A lot of BBC reminiscences, at which Barry excels.

He always attributes the source of a story most generously. He tells of Dennis Main Wilson once rounding on John Wells in the BBC bar, pint
of beer clutched in the crook of his arm, and firing at him ‘Christianity … bum steer?’

Alan is acting in a Nigel Williams play for the BBC. I ask him about the part … ‘Oh, the usual,’ he says. ‘I went in for a costume fitting and they took one look at what I was wearing and said “That’ll do”.’

I drive Barry C back to Finchley Road Tube. He thinks Graham Chapman has become duller since he gave up strong drink.

Clean the house in preparation for Sandy Lieberson and the Gilliams.

TG has only just returned from the US, where his battle with Sid Sheinberg is coming along nicely. He was invited to show
Brazil
(in the UK, European version) at USC [University of Southern California], but Sheinberg himself phoned USC to put pressure on them not to show the film, and in the end only clips could be used. A great rabble-rousing speech from Terry won over the students, but the Dean remained unmoving and refused to let the film be shown! DO’B, for the record, thinks that TG can never win and is doomed as far as any future work in Hollywood goes.