Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (3 page)

I still can’t quite work out why all this happened the way it did, and I re-read the diaries with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief. The overall impression is of a kaleidoscope of characters and events, clarity and confusion, of great strides forward and long and rambling cul-de-sacs, from which a pattern emerges, but only briefly, like the moon between clouds on a stormy night. I’m in my late thirties when this volume begins and my mid-forties when it ends, so one might imagine that the course of my life and career would be settling down. But the inescapable conclusion from reading these entries is that this is a man who still doesn’t really
know what he wants to do, or what he’s particularly qualified to do.

If this were a history, or an autobiography written in the future looking back, I feel sure the temptation would be to impose order and reason and logic on this period of my life, to detect themes and trends that led in one direction, in other words to make sense of it all.

But diaries don’t allow such luxuries. The events of everyday life are by their nature unpredictable, not at all at ease with the order that we crave as we grow older. Meaning changes, slips, adjusts, evolves. Narrative exists only in its most basic sense.

Which is why I like diaries. The map may be constantly changing, the steering wheel may be spinning all over the place, but diaries are the sound of an engine running, day in and day out.

 

Michael Palin
London, April 2009

‘I did, I think, nothing’

Evelyn Waugh’s diary,
26th June 1924

With the social and gastronomic excesses of Christmas and New Year over, life this weekend has returned, after many weeks, to something approaching calm. I find I can easily cope with eight hours’ sleep a night. I find I enjoy having time to sort my books out or take the children out or sit in front of the fire. I feel my body and my mind adjusting to a new pace and a new rhythm. I’ve hardly used the car in the last week. I haven’t been into town, or shopping, or having business meetings. And I feel the benefits of this pause, this time to take stock of the present instead of endless worryings over the future or the past.

I’ve become a little self-sufficient, too. Though Gilliam is a regular visitor – like a mother hen having to keep returning to the nest to make
sure the eggs are still all right – I’m responsible for the writing pace at the moment. I know that just over the horizon is the full swirl of a dozen different projects, meetings, responsibilities, considerations and demands, but for now the sea is calm.

Denis [O’Brien] was back from the States today. According to TG he has no backers for the film [
Time Bandits
], but intends to go ahead and do it himself – just to ‘spite them all’. I think this leaves me feeling as uncomfortable as it does Terry. But I read him some of the opening scenes, which cheer him up.

Pat Casey
¹
rings to know my availability. She has a movie part which was written for Dudley Moore. He’s now charging one and a half million dollars a picture and wants to do some serious acting, so Pat is asking me if I would be interested in the part. I have to turn it down as I’m occupied this year.

At Redwood [Studios] at four. Eric, moderately well laid-back, occasionally strumming guitar. Trevor Jones
²
bustling. André
³
looking tired, but working faithfully. Graham [Chapman], who is getting £5,000 a month from Python as co-producer of this album [Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation], sits contentedly, with John [Tomiczek] in attendance. He seems, as usual, not quite in tune with what’s going on around him. I record the Headmaster’s speech and that’s about all.

Up to the Crown at Seven Dials for a drink with Terry Gilliam and Roger Pratt.
⁴
This is more like the real world for me. I can believe in the three of us and the place and the people around us far more than I can in what’s going on at Redwood. Clearly TG feels the same. He’s a bit
confused by Denis’s attitude to his film – on the one hand he is supportive and confident in TG – the next he’s suggesting stars and names with almost frantic indiscrimination.

Rachel’s first day at Gospel Oak School. It’s a rather glum, hard, cold day with weather from the east. I don’t see Rachel leave as I’m at the Mornington Foot Clinic. Mr Owen natters and reminisces as he slices at my foot – removing not only the corn but valuable minutes of screenwriting!

Home by ten. Rachel seems to have taken to school without any traumas. In fact Helen seems to have been affected more by the experience.

Unplug the phone and get down to the knotty problems of making an adventure serious and funny. Jim Franklin
⁵
rings to offer me a part in the Goodies and Pat Casey to try and induce me yet again to take a Dudley Moore cast-off.

Up and running early this morning. The temperature is just on freezing and the grass on top of Parliament Hill is covered with frost. Feel immensely refreshed and thoroughly awoken.

Arrive at T Gilliam’s just after 10.30.

Progress is steady but not spectacular, though TG is very amused by the Robin Hood sequence.

To Denis O’B’s for a meeting at two. Denis looks weary. He was up working on ‘structures’ for TG’s film until 2.30 yesterday morning. But he seems to be as bright and tenaciously thorough about all my affairs as he ever was.

Home by six. Feel encouraged after our meeting. Denis has talked of an India project – and self-financing of it, rather like TG’s film – but basically my encouragement stems from the knowledge that with Denis we are in a different league. For the first time we are being offered the prospect of quite considerable financial rewards. Denis clearly identifies
money with power – although in our case our ‘power’, in terms of reputation, was established and created without vast rewards. Now Denis wants the rewards for us and through us for himself.

At the moment he seems to have admirable goals, but I have this nagging feeling that our ‘freedom’ to do whatever we want may be threatened if Denis is able to build up this juggernaut of Python earning power and influence. A few of the most interesting projects may be rolled flat.

To Anne’s [James] for a Python meeting with Denis. JC, fresh returned from Barbados, stands there shivering. Anne, as thoughtful as ever, has provided some lunch. Meeting is basically to discuss Denis’s two offers for the next [Monty Python] movie – from Warners and Paramount. Warners want a screenplay before going ahead, Paramount just a treatment. Denis is asking for 6.4 million dollars.

Time is of the essence, as Paramount, who are offering a better financial deal, do require the movie for summer 1981 release. This, I feel, puts pressures on the group which we would rather not have – and thankfully no-one feels any different. But JC suggests that we go along with Paramount at the moment and just see if, after the seven-week March/April writing period, we have enough to give them a treatment – ‘In which case we could all go ahead and make a lot of money very quickly.’

Though we all feel the Paramount deal for the next movie is the one to pursue, Denis is proposing to try and place
Grail
, now released from Cinema 5, with Warners, so they can do a
Life of Brian/Holy Grail
re-release in the US next summer. There is no great enthusiasm for selling the Bavaria film as a Python Olympic Special to the US networks in summer of this year. Eric reckons there will be no Olympics anyway. Certainly the Russian invasion of Afghanistan has shaken things up.

TG comes round and we talk over Denis and the movie. But I’m feeling very unsettled about my role in it at the moment. The script is clogged and I’ve lost a day’s writing today. There seems suddenly so much to do and I refuse to give up my railway project [contributing to the BBC’s
Great Railway Journeys
], despite reportedly ‘generous’ financial inducements from Denis to prolong my work on the TG movie.

André arrives very late, bringing a quite beautiful tape of Trevor Jones’s
arrangement for ‘Decomposing Composers’. How the hell I’ll sing it, I don’t know.

Go with Tom and Helen to a ‘parents’ view’ at Acland Burghley Comprehensive, one of the three local schools which Tom will have to be selected for, and where he will be well ensconced by this time next year.

A modern school, presenting a forbidding aspect, cloaked as it is in heavy grey concrete. The doors and passageways give the immediate impression of a hard, unpretty, pragmatist mind at work. But the library/reading room, where about 20 of us parents assemble, is warm and bright, the shelves are well-filled. I noticed
Soviet Weekly
alongside
The Economist
.

We were shown into a biology room and given glowing prospects of the future of this school. However I couldn’t help noticing a large piece of paper on the front of a cupboard low on the ground near our feet, which bore the simple legend ‘Whoever reads this is a cunt’.

The world seems to have started 1980 so badly that I have on occasions this past week questioned the wisdom of working myself to a standstill when all the elements for the start of another global war crowd the newspapers for headline space. Ultimatums are flying around and ultimatums, to me, are synonymous with the outbreak of World War II.

It may in a few years sound rather laughable that Jimmy Carter threatened Russia that he will pull America out of the Olympics if the Russians haven’t withdrawn their forces from Afghanistan by mid-February, but combined as this pronouncement is with the volatility of unsettled Iran and the much more threatening stances being taken up in preparation for President Tito’s imminent death in Yugoslavia, the potential flashpoints seem sure to light something.

But it all ultimately is unreal and either you panic and sell everything you’ve got to buy gold, or you just sit down and have breakfast, presuming it won’t be the last one. And of course it isn’t.

Denis O’B rings. His proposal for my work on the T Gilliam film is that I be made a partner, along with Terry G, in the production company, so I will be able to share with TG the depreciation on capital which will be worth £60,000 in tax advantages. Don’t ask me why, but this is clearly a generous move on the part of George [Harrison] and Denis O’B, who are the providers of the money.

And I can go ahead with the railway documentary – ‘If you really want to,’ says Denis, unhappily, knowing that there’s precious little he can do to squeeze more than £2,400 out of the BBC for what’s ostensibly 12 weeks’ work!

In the afternoon a two and a half hour visit to Haverstock School. A lived-in, scuffed and battered collection of buildings. Impressed by the straightforwardness of the teachers. Impressed by the lack of waffle about tradition, Latin and prayers and the emphasis on the future and helping all the children of whatever ability equally.

An impossible ideal, some may say, but at least these teachers are confronting the most basic problems of an educational system with great energy and cheeriness. I was encouraged.

The world situation seems to have cooled down, though I see in my
Times
that Paul McCartney is still in jail in Japan after being caught at the airport with naughty substances. How silly. Eric reckons it’s a put-up job – part of John Lennon’s price, which he’s exacting from Paul for being rude to Yoko.

At five I brave the skyscraper-induced blasts of icy wind that whip round the Euston Tower and find myself in Capital Radio, being asked questions on, and reading extracts from,
Decline and Fall
. I find I’m never as lucid when the tape’s rolling as I am over a glass of wine at home an hour later and in the course of an hour I get tongue-tied and fail to say even what I meant to say – let alone whether that was worth saying or not. I’m in august company – Denis Norden and Melvyn Bragg are the other two pundits on this particular book. JC has already said his piece about
Twelfth Night
(from which Shakespeare didn’t emerge very favourably) and TJ is soon to do
The Spire
by William Golding.

The fine weather’s back again. Tito’s recovering and the steel strike is still faced with government intransigence. I have either pulled, twisted or bruised some muscle below and to the right of my kneecap, so I rest from running today, despite ideal, dry, cool, bright conditions out there.