Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (67 page)

Read
The Mirrorstone
. I’m quite pleased, but there are moments when the story content seems perilously arbitrary and I wouldn’t say that this project is one which fits me like a glove.

In my prescient moments I do worry that, such will be the fuss made of the book, there will be little chance of my avoiding responsibility, so I should be sure not to make it something I’ll be embarrassed about. But then it isn’t a project with any precedent – not in my experience. A story to fit a technique.

Meal with Terry J. He’s casting away on
Personal Services
, which he keeps referring to as ‘Personal Functions’.

To Richard Seymour’s studio in Fulham.

They read the new draft then and there. On the whole they seem pleased, but not ecstatic. The discussion then becomes wider, with Richard S having a number of proposals and Alan, much more quietly but equally persistently, putting in his criticism as well. Our talks last for nearly four hours.

For some reason Jonathan Miller’s son is there to take photographs of the three of us for the publishers. Is this some legal precaution on their part? Why waste valuable time taking publicity photos when we still don’t have the book?

Am not home until 9.15 and I know that I’m now under pressure. I have tomorrow to co-ordinate all the new ideas into a third draft. Will have to cancel my National Film School visit.

At 1.15 I scribble the last lines, but am not at our rendezvous – the Pontevecchio Restaurant in Old Brompton Road – until ten to two. Apologies, then read through the new material as best I can with waiters interjecting things like ‘Spinach?’, ‘Who is the gamberetti?’ and so on.

At 8.30 I’m at my desk looking over
Mirrorstone
again. Final, final amendments, then it’s off to Valerie Kettley at Cape by lunchtime.

I celebrate my relief at the work accomplished by sitting and reading Al L’s ‘Roommates’ at one go. Though I feel dozy and below par, my condition is as nothing to the awfulness Al describes in this ‘novelised’ account of his cancer op.

At one point he finds Python on hospital TV and gratefully switches over to his favourite show, only to find it’s the ‘Brutal Hospital’ sequence – with TJ staggering towards him, blood pouring from his stomach. Al, for perhaps the first time in his life, can’t take Python and flicks the switch.

Lunch at the Gay Hussar with Richard Faulkner, the man I met by chance at Leeds Station whilst on the rounds with
Limericks
, and a lady called Susan Hoyle, from Islington. A brisk, earnest, forceful but not overbearing woman.

They ask me to become Chairman of Transport 2000. This I am completely unprepared for, but they are persistent and persuasive. An architect was Chairman, but he now wants to move on. I should need to attend a monthly board meeting, write occasional letters and make appearances occasionally on TV and radio. Susan H would supply me with the facts and figures.

I leave the Gay Hussar and cross Soho Square with my mind racing. At last a chance to become involved on more than just a nominal level with one of the issues I feel most strongly about.

In to my copy-editing appointment at Cape.

Flat, moist, drab, very mild weather as I drive down there. Valerie [Kettley], very motherly, and deceptively soft, then begins to go through their suggestions for improving grammar, etc. This is on a much more comprehensive scale than I’ve ever been used to before. I’m just inordinately glad that the text is only 4,000 words.

Before I leave I’m shown into Tom M’s office. He’s lost weight and looks rather wild-eyed and jumpy. Not a man who is completely better.
He refers to the ‘time off’ and admits that he’d reached the stage where he could no longer read a simple letter. Here he motions to his desk, which looks as chaotic and disordered as Tom himself. ‘Well, I’d been working 18 hours a day for 25 years’ and so on.

I feel a bit sorry for him. This huge, high-ceilinged office suddenly feels like a mausoleum and I have the feeling that Tom knows and everyone else in Cape knows that his best days are over. That he is now almost a revered relic in the company he’s done so much for.

Yesterday the LA critics chose
Brazil
as their Best Film of the year, TG as Best Director and the script as Best Screenplay. This, over
Color Purple
and
Out of Africa
, was an enormous surprise to everybody, but now puts
Brazil
in as a potential Oscar-winner. And it’s not yet been shown.

TG and Arnon are off to the States in the next couple of days to try and negotiate the requisite one week’s playing time it will need, before December 31st, to be eligible for the ’86 Oscars. In ten days the NY critics will be selecting their winners and
Brazil
is now bound to be taken a lot more seriously. Amazing scenes, as they say.

Dinner with the Alburys. SA’s octopus soup sensational. Then osso bucco. Talk to him about the Transport 2000 proposal. He advises acceptance.

Drive over to J Goldstone’s Christmas cocktail party. Not that there are cocktails. No-one in our line seems to offer them.

Al Clark [the editor and film producer] confesses that he has nominated me for a best supporting performance award for
Brazil
. He says he’s quite concerned as to where such a convincing streak of nastiness lies hidden! Ruby Wax says she spent three years trying to learn how to pronounce my name.

Outside as we leave the rain pelts down. Makes for a difficult drive on to our next venue – the Elton John concert (featuring Ray Cooper) at Wembley Arena. Ushered by walkie-talkie-wielding promoter’s men to the ‘guest enclosure’.

All we can see is the back of Elton’s head.

Ray gets an enormous ovation when Elton introduces the band. I can
see why Elton may be nervous of having him there. He is so much more charismatic than dear old Elton – described so well by John Peel in the
Observer
as giving the impression of not so much a rock singer, more an amiable mini-cab driver.

Afterwards Elton, who seems very aware that we are Ray’s pals and that Ray is very highly thought of, is almost defensive to start with. Shakes hands with his left hand and seems to only want to talk about the
Meaning of Life
and the ‘Grim Reaper’ scene, which he regards as a work of pure genius.

We talk of Watford and Sheffield Wednesday and he says the football chairmen and managers who run the FA are, en masse, a depressing bunch.

A wet and miserable morning. Low, gloomy, damp skies. To Euston to catch the 9.35 to Birmingham with Hettie, who’s organising
Limericks
publicity. We talk about Transport 2000, on which I still haven’t taken a decision. I feel myself that if I had really thought it the right thing to do, I would have said yes a week ago. This indecision, I sense, is a way of saying no. Hettie sensibly makes the point that whatever decision I take I’ll regret at some time.

The buffet crew are in a mellow, pre-Christmas mood and strains of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ fill the train – hummed, rather badly, over the intercom!

Valerie Kettley of Cape calls to hear my reactions to their latest changes. It takes more than an hour to talk through the latest draft.

Tom M wants the front part reduced even further. Valerie is paid to do Tom’s bidding and tries desperately to make every line, every word cut she can. We end up friends, though, after I bridle to begin with.

The unusually inviting weather lures me to a run after we’ve finished our exhaustive talk. As I run I talk through with myself the Transport 2000 offer. I feel that I must make up my mind and resolve to do it as soon as I get home.

For two or three miles most of my thoughts are negative. I’m an entertainer, a comedian – I’ve no business launching into things I know
so little about. I haven’t the time, I shall be dragged into all sorts of activities above and beyond running meetings – and I may not be able to do that anyway.

Against this is a feeling that here is a rare chance to do something sensible. To help a good cause. Is it not my public duty to become involved, if it will help them? The public and private sectors of my life are locked in struggle.

I really cannot make a decision. But as I run down from Parliament Hill I’m pretty much decided to say no. When, after a bath, I pick up the phone to Sue Hoyle, I’m pretty much decided to say no. When she answers I say yes. On the condition that it’s a year only.

Wake at nine from a deep sleep. Children already dressed. All of them clamber on our bed as we undo our stockings. All I hear from Rachel is ‘Dad! You’ve left the price on!’ A very good feeling of being together, sharing the day.

I read out bits of
A Christmas Carol
, as I do whenever we have Christmas here. Note the use of the word ‘good’ eight times in one sentence and think of Tom Maschler’s endless notes on my
Mirrorstone
copy – ‘repetition’! He’d have had a field day with Dickens.

Most of the day I have that restless, slightly unfulfilled feeling which hits on a Sunday. I suppose I miss religion – which throughout childhood used to take care of most of the day. In its most negative form – a guilt about doing anything too weekday-ish – its effect is still with me.

Watch a review of ’85. Full of ugly images. Football hooligans, South African police, striking miners and police striking back. And the West, like the weather today, in the frozen grip of the forces of conservatism. Not a year I shall miss.

A little nervously up to the Royal Free at 9.15 for an appointment with Morgan, the urologist. Freudenberg has suggested I see him after passing blood a few weeks ago – and once before in Sierra Leone.

Nearly all the ancillary staff seem to be West Indians, rather in the way that most of those who keep Heathrow Airport clean are Indians – it can’t be just coincidence. I’m carrying with me a sample of urine in a jar that once contained apple sauce.

I see Dr Morgan at a quarter to ten. A man of about my age. He asks me a lot of questions, then examines me. After this he tells me he would like to run some tests, just to ‘eliminate possibilities’, though he hints that it could be something minor and quite safe, like a blood vessel in the bladder temporarily rupturing.

I am to have my blood tested and to come in for an X-ray on Thursday morning. He would then like to do a cystoscopy – which is a bladder examination up the urinal tract. He thinks he can get me in on Thursday afternoon. This is all rather sudden (and causes a part of my mind to entertain paranoid imaginings).

I set off on a late run across the Heath.

Of course there’s probably nothing much wrong, but clearly the tests will be looking for signs of cancer and I feel a twinge of panic, which isn’t helped by the encroaching darkness and the sound of a bell being dolefully rung outside Kenwood House by one of the park staff.

Read some of Ackroyd’s
Hawksmoor
until at 8.30 two nurses arrive with my pre-med. This is injected in the bum and is called Omnipon. Delightful feeling of drowsiness without fatigue.

Listen to Haydn’s string quartets and some of Bruce Springsteen. Try to read, but the lines roll in front of my eyes. They’re running late on the op before me, I’m told, so I have another three hours on Omnipon.

Then it’s time to take a journey to the theatre which exactly recreates the speed, the door-banging, but not the discourtesy of the start of
Meaning of Life
. I’m asked for my autograph at the end of the journey. Someone says ‘No, not now’, but I find myself surprised that I can still write.

In the ante-room I’m in the middle of telling some story to the anaesthetist, who is pumping something into the back of my left hand, and then I’m in a recovery room and hear my nurses saying ‘He looks better than when he went in’. I’m so pleased to see them all I just start talking again. I think I’m the only one in the recovery room who’s conscious.

I doze on and off, but am reading a book within three hours of the op. Helen comes in at about 3.30 and says that Morgan has rung up to tell her everything was OK. I knew it would be.

I have a disconcerting and painful pee. Burning sensation, then blood – quite thick – and a sort of urinary cough – air spluttering out through the penis.

Not sure whether or why the two-day exploration of my urinary system should be responsible, but I have a good night of qualitatively quite different dreams than usual. Clear physical images, some nice erotic moments. Maybe something still lingering in the system.

Down to the South Bank. Rachel comes along with me. The ‘Ten Day Wonder’ event is a GLC booking, so I have to sign an assurance that
I won’t perform in South Africa or Namibia. I resent this – it’s as if I can’t be trusted to make my own moral decisions.

I go on at 2.30. The house is about two-thirds full and there are a lot of under-sixes.

Small Harry
and
Cyril
read the best,
Limericks
the worst. Not much response to Belloc or A A Milne, or Just William. End up making up limericks on the spot. Find I’ve done one and a half hours without a break – no wonder I feel a surge of weariness.

By taxi to Golden Square for a showing of JC’s new film,
Clockwise
. Starts promisingly, even though many of the jokes are sub-Fawlty – including, amazingly enough, kicking and hitting a car that won’t go.