Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (46 page)

A guardsman on duty asks me to sign the inside of his peaked cap. (‘It’s all I’ve got,’ he says apologetically.) A rather attractive lady PC grins at me.

Producer and cameraman appear.

We retire to the pub opposite to kill the half-hour before the No. 10 Press Officer arrives. At midday it’s decided that valour is the better part of discretion and all three of us march up to the police barrier. The particular constable on duty this time recognises me as no threat to the
PM and we’re in and walking up the narrow street – one of the most famous, if not
the
most famous narrow street in the world.

The camera is set up, alongside a permanent display of three or four video cameras and a group of pressmen drinking cans of Harp lager and not looking at all respectful of the hallowed ground they’re on. Behind me the rather dull façade of No. 10. I notice all the net curtains are dirty.

With little fuss and bother we start shooting. After a while the press hacks stop talking to each other and come to listen (this in itself is very disconcerting). Some of them I can see falling about with laughter and this encourages me through to the end of an almost perfect take.

And not a moment too soon. A very senior PC looms up and looks very cross. The photographers seem delighted and snap away at him telling us off. We’re asked to leave. As we do so, reporters cluster around asking if I’m the new Home Secretary, etc, etc.

Pick up Ray Cooper and he and I set off for a day at Henley.

George is waiting for us before the recently-scrubbed walls of Friar Park. He wears a shaggy old sports jacket which he claims has been threaded through with dental floss.

Transfer from Ray’s hired black Range Rover to George’s black Porsche. George drives us to Marlow as if he is at Silverstone. We dine at The Compleat Angler. It’s superbly sited beside the broad weir at Marlow, looking out over a view which is the very epitome of nature tamed.

George, as usual in such places, is extremely ill at ease to start with. He resents the ‘posh’ service and feels that, considering he can afford to buy the restaurant several times over, the staff are unnecessarily snotty. But he loosens up over a bottle of champagne. Some excellent smoked salmon, and trout, and a second bottle – this time of Aloxe Corton ’69.

We laugh a lot and talk about films and not being able to write them. I think George thinks that I’ve come to see him to ask for money, and offers it eagerly and generously. But when he finds out that all I have to tell him is that I can’t write a film by August he sympathises and loosens up. ‘I’ve been trying to retire for half my life,’ he mourns.

Back at Friar Park, George runs through whole scenes of
The Producers
word for word – acting the parts out extremely well. Olivia has some American girlfriends who have ‘dropped in’ whilst touring Europe. When they’ve gone, Ray opens some pink Dom Perignon, which is very rare
and must have cost the earth, and we sit in the little kitchen and talk about Python and things in an easy, effortlessly friendly way.

George gives me a souvenir as I leave – a baton belonging to the Chief Constable of Liverpool, which GH took off him at the Liverpool premiere of
A Hard Day’s Night!

The general ease and pleasure of the day added to by the fact that we only have to walk ten yards or so for our dinner tonight. To the Brazilians who are renting No. 24. Eleas, who is the husband, a psychoanalyst, cooks. He is an intellectual in the Continental sense of the word – critical, left-wing, multi-lingual, serious, a little intimidating. She is voluble, full of laughter, from a massively populous peasant family.

They are not a grumbling pair, but do criticise the English reserve – the long faces of neighbours.

He has come to study because the best of the German Jewish psychoanalysts came here before the war and it is, as a result, the best country in the world for the study of psychoanalysis. But the British immigration people are very difficult and always give him a hard time when he returns to the country. They’re never violent, they never confront you with any direct accusations, he says, they just make you feel bad.

Leave for Ealing at one [for
Comic Roots
filming]. The set, to represent No. 26 Whitworth Road [my birthplace in Sheffield], is at Tony Laryea’s brother’s house and looks quite effective.

At 2.15 Spike M arrives. As usual with him there is a brittle air of tension and unpredictability, but he and I sit down and natter for a half-hour about the Goons – the coining of words like ‘sponned’ [as in ‘I been sponned!’]. He raves about ‘Eric Olthwaite’. I rave about Eccles.
⁸⁷
By the time the second camera is up and ready to shoot he seems to have relaxed.

An aeroplane thunders low overhead as soon as we start. His answers to my questions about the Goons are almost identical to the answers I always give when asked about the Pythons – we did it to make ourselves
laugh, to laugh at authority, we always had a love/hate relationship with the BBC, etc. Even the name ‘The Goon Show’ was their own and only reluctantly accepted by the BBC, who wanted ‘The Crazy People Show’.

Then Spike has to leave and my mother arrives. She is very nervous, as one would expect of someone making their TV debut at the age of 79, but soon gets over it as we sit together on the couch and in the end she is utterly professional and quite unflapped. She tells her stories smoothly and says delightfully disarming things such as (of
The Meaning of Life
) ‘ … Of course it’s very rude … but I like that.’

Rush away at midday to Gerry Donovan to have the temporary dental bridge he put in four years ago checked. He reminds me that ‘It usually comes out about this time of year.’ Last year when I ate a call-sheet on the way back from ‘
Mish
’ filming in Liverpool and the year before in some pleasant Cretan village as I tucked into freshly spit-roasted lamb. But this year, touch wood, it remains.

Out in the evening to a screening of
Bullshot
at the Fox Theatre. George H is there and Ray and Norman Garwood and David Wimbury [the associate producer] and various others. Twenty or thirty in all. Find the first ten minutes very ordinary, and the overplayed style rather off-putting, but the film gradually wins me over, by its sheer panache and good nature.

George opts to drive with me from Soho Square to Knightsbridge, but when I can’t find where I’ve left my car, I feel he wishes he hadn’t. A bit like an animal caught in a searchlight is our George when out on the streets and I can see him getting a little twitchy as he and I – a Beatle and a Python – parade up and down before the diners on the pavements of Charlotte Street, looking for my car.

Of course no-one notices and eventually I get George into the Mini and across London. He gives me a breakdown of one or two of the Indian cults currently in this country – Rajneesh I should be especially careful about. No inner discipline required – just fuck as many people as you can. Sounds interesting.

Our Chinese meal gets quite boisterous owing to the presence of a
dark, slightly tubby Jewish girl who does ‘improv’ at the Comic Strip. I find these American ‘improv’ people the most difficult of companions. Most of them are perfectly nice, decent, reasonable company until they start performing – which is about every ten minutes – and you are expected to join in some whacky improv.

But we outstay most other people in the restaurant and become very noisy and jolly and all drink out of one huge glass and muck around with the straws and end up on the quiet streets of Knightsbridge being appallingly loud at a quarter to one.

Have been offered the part of Mother Goose in the Shaw Theatre panto and also the lead in a new Howard Brenton play – rehearsing in August. Torn on this one, it sounds the sort of heavy, non-comedic role that might be quite exciting and unusual for me. But August is hols and September/October is writing with Terry J.

Spend the afternoon being photographed by Terry O’Neill for
TV Cable Week
. Terry is a Londoner with an insatiable curiosity about everything that’s going on – the Test Match, jazz (when he finds out that Tom is learning the saxophone), films (he’s directing his first picture in the autumn –
Duet for One
– Faye Dunaway, his wife, in the lead). Very much one of the lads – I can remember playing football with him ten years ago. He was a good winger. He’s down-to-earth and unpretentious and probably keen to be the best at everything he does.

Photos everywhere – with railway, at desk and with family. All self-conscious to some degree, except Rachel, who loves being photographed!

At seven, after cooking baked beans and toast for the children’s supper and leaving Thomas in charge again, we drive out to Olivia’s party at Friar Park.

Arrive there about 8.25 and cannot make contact through the intercom on the locked gates, so we drive round to the back gate and press more buttons. A passing horsewoman suggests we try again – ‘Probably got the music on rather loud,’ she explains.

When we do gain admittance, there is a very restrained group of people standing politely sipping champagne, and listening to nothing louder
than a harp, in a tent at the end of the lawn. Friar Park, pristine and floodlit, looks like the venue for a
son et lumière
, up on the rise behind us.

Joe Brown arrives. Calling everyone ‘gal’ or ‘old gal’, he proceeds to rave about ‘Golden Gordon’, repeating all the moments – but unlike Spike getting them word for word right. He has been able to get over here because the promoter of his concert was hit by a sock filled with billiard balls and is temporarily out of business.

The champagne flows liberally and people wander about the house. In his studio George demonstrates a machine which will make any sound into music electronically.

We meet Nelson Piquet, the Brazilian driver who came second at Silverstone yesterday, and John Watson is here too.
⁸⁸
Piquet a little, perky, pleasantly ambitious Brazilian. He loves his work. No doubts, no fears, from what he says.

The evening cools and the setting is quite perfect. Derek [Taylor] tells me the code used to avoid mentioning drugs specifically. ‘I’ve got all the Charles Aznavour albums to play tonight’ means an evening of the naughtiest, most illicit substances, whilst a Charles Aznavour EP may just be some cocaine …

And so, on this high note, we drive out of this dreamland, down the M4 back to reality.

Catch the train at Gospel Oak. Breakfast on the 8.30 from Liverpool Street. Mum collects me and drives me in her blue Metro back to Croft Cottage.

Have to do some PR with her new neighbours. At one point he takes my arm and leads me to one side … He apologises, hopes he’s not speaking ‘out of turn’, but my mother is … ‘well … no longer a young woman’, so have I ‘any contingency plans’?

A restorative nine-hour sleep. Outside the best of English summer days – a clear sunlight sharply delineating the trees and cornfields. Sparrows already at dustbaths in the garden below.

Sort out some of Daddy’s old papers – finally commit to the Lothingland Sanitary Department many of the school bills, school insurance bills, etc, which he had painstakingly kept. Learn from the family record that my grandfather – a Norfolk doctor – was also a very keen photographer and had exhibited in London. He was a gardener of repute and a Freemason. He and his wife sound a fiercely competent couple. Founding the local Red Cross, etc.

Home for lateish ham supper. Helen tells me about her BUPA medical screening today and of the dashing doctor Ballantine who picked her leg up and waggled it about!

The evening almost spent (and both of us weary) when Alan Bennett rings and, with much umming and aahing, asks if I would like to read a part in a new screenplay he’s written. It’s about a chiropodist, he says … oh, and pigs as well. Of course I fall eagerly on the chance and a neat man called Malcolm Mowbray – fashionably turned out – brings the script around.

Read it there and then – such is my curiosity. Slightly disappointed that the part of Gilbert Chilvers is not a) bigger, b) more difficult or different from things I’ve done. But he does have his moments and it’s a very funny and well-observed period piece (set in 1947).

Decide to sleep on it.

To the seven o’clock performance of
King of Comedy
at the Screen on the Hill. Very enjoyable – one of the less dark of Scorsese’s modern parables, with much wit and many laughs and another extraordinary and skilful and concentrated and successful performance by De Niro. Jerry Lewis (one of my childhood heroes) excellent too.

Come home and, over a cold plateful and glasses of wine, think about the Bennett play. Decide that it is not a difficult or special enough part to drop either my writing with TJ, Belfast Festival commitments or semi-commitment to TG. Ring Alan in Yorkshire, but cannot get him.

Up to Abbotsley – driving through heavy, but very localised storms and arriving in time for a tennis knock-up before lunch. The air is heavy and damp and the sunshine breaks through only occasionally.

Hang the hammock and play more tennis – pursuits that mark the summer and for which I have literally had no time for two years. A lovely afternoon.

Alan Bennett is up in North Yorkshire and he says the lights have all just gone out. I tell him of my liking for the
Private Function
script, but of my problem with commitments until the end of the year. ‘Oh, it won’t be till May at least,’ counters Alan. ‘That’s the earliest Maggie’s available.’ [He wants Maggie Smith to play my wife.] So there seems no point in saying I’ve decided over the weekend not to do it.