Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (90 page)

Michael has to take some decisions and cancels the Lyric’s production of
The Hypochondriac
[Molière’s
Malade Imaginaire
] – ‘A lot of money wasted there,’ he shakes his head resignedly, rather than angrily. He then opens a bottle of champagne and we begin to get a little drunk.

The Europa will not be cleared until two o’clock. There have been so many alerts all over Belfast that the bomb disposal teams cannot cope.

I end up being offered a bed on the floor at Robert Agnew’s house.
¹⁶⁶
Thus I find myself in the unreal calm of a suburban house in Myrtlewood Road, finally getting my head down in Robert’s front room at a quarter to one.

I wake in the middle of the night. Not immediately sure where I am. I look up and there, staring down at me, is Rowan Atkinson. The walls of the room are covered with Opera House playbills.

Doze some more, then lie awake thinking of my own show. Completely unrehearsed, yet by the time this day is over it will have played to 500 people, and possibly been telerecorded. The script isn’t even complete. Try to go to sleep and forget about it. Only partially successful.

Last night 21 different bombs and suspect vehicles were dotted around the city by the IRA in an attempt to show they still have formidable ability to stretch the Security Forces. Two vehicles were detonated and the rest were hijacked vehicles with no bombs in them.

At the theatre Ulster TV cameras are installing themselves. They are anxious not to disrupt at all, and they won’t need extra lighting, but I feel exposed suddenly. The show has always been so private.

We go up at 8.10. I’m discovered standing on the podium for the ‘Olympic’ opening and rewarded with a good round of applause. Everything hangs together. I’m pleased with my delivery. Most of the cues work. Very few laughs dropped.

To Goodge Street and Heal’s Restaurant, where I am to meet Clem Vallance (at his invitation).

Clem V tells me of an embarrassing lunch that the BBC laid on a year ago to try and tempt Alan Whicker to be the presenter of
80 Days
. As soon as Whicker heard that not only could he not bring ‘the little woman’ along, but that he might have to spend several days and nights on an Arab dhow, not much more was heard.

Clem says I was always top of
his
list, with Clive James second. He floats the possibility of approaching Michael Grade to make it independently,
¹⁶⁷
but really there is little we can do until the BBC make the next move.

Denis is in very bad shape. Apparently he started shaking this morning and Helen took him again to the vet. But now he’s breathing only with difficulty and in short, gravelly intakes. Every now and then he retches violently, bringing up very little but bile, but clearly causing himself great
discomfort. Helen is out. I ring the emergency vet, who counsels me to keep him warm.

Denis is at the top of the stairs, but very weak, still breathing in dry, rasping gasps occasionally accompanied by fierce twitching of the head. I drive him to the vet at Islington with Helen. I wait in Cross Street, noting a run-down but elegant Georgian terrace of town houses opposite me.

We drive home. The vet will call us again at five o’clock with news. A day of phone calls clouded by the chance that one of them may announce the end of our Denis.

A script by Jonny Lynn called
Nuns on the Run
has arrived with Eric’s blessing.

Then by taxi to Soho to do an LBC interview with Michael Aspel re the Python album. I like Aspel. He’s straight and amiable and likes a laugh and our piece is as relaxed and comfortable as any I’ve done for a while.

The day begins to gather momentum as Helen prepares not only for a dinner party tonight, but also for a TV interview she’s to do for the BBC on ‘Motherhood’. I take out the car and go to collect fuel, booze, food, etc.

When I get back at about half past three, Helen greets me with the news that Denis is dead. The vet and Helen took the decision about ten minutes before she had to go into the interview. Sally Doganis, producer, seems pleased by the piece. ‘There won’t be a dry eye in the house after they’ve heard Helen,’ she tells me. I imagine that it must all be to do with the loss of Denis, but in fact she is referring to Helen’s contributions on motherhood.

Not only is the news of Denis’s death communicated to me before an entire BBC film crew, but as they are clearing up, the children arrive back and have to be told. With Rachel it’s unbearable. She’s at the front door having said goodbye to her friends. I’m unloading logs. I call to her. She turns and preempts the careful phrases … ‘Is Denis dead?’

Tears well up in both of us and I put my arm round her. If only the film had been on ‘Loss’ or ‘Grief ’ they’d have had a real scoop.

After breakfast Rachel and Helen go off to Islington to collect Denis’s basket from the vet and I am hoovering the stair-carpet an hour or so later when they return, with another cat peeping out like a rejuvenated Denis. Rachel was so taken with this five-month-old tabby which the vet had been looking after for some time that she and Helen decided then and there that they should bring her home. She’s a spayed female. No name. Helen will look out for a neutered male to be company for her.

I must say at first I am a little shocked by the speed of the arrival of the replacement for Denis. I feel I haven’t had enough time to accept his absence. But she is a perky, curious, friendly little cat. Permanently wide-eyed of course, especially at the to-ing and fro-ing in our house, the glass, lights, mirrors and so on.

A very good roast beef Sunday dinner and we debate names for the cat. Nancy, Lucy, but Tom finally cracks it with Betty. So Betty, with her colouring which is, as Will says, a negative of Denis – smoky black where Denis was white – comes to be part of Julia St life.

Steve A arrives. An update on all our activities.

He tells me of the
Wanda
screening in NYC. Seventy-eight percent of the cards filled in (243) put the movie in the top two of five categories.

Anyway, MGM are now pleased, though by mutual agreement they and the producers will alter certain things which the screening seemed to tell them. The audience didn’t like to see blood when the dog’s crushed, and felt the fish torture too hard to take. And these are the audiences that flocked to the cheerful slaughter of
Beverly Hills Cop
.

Ring Camilla to find out if her friend saw the Belfast show and catch her in a tearful state. She’s been dealing with a suicide at work and had been affected by the news of the churchman who committed suicide yesterday in a fume-filled car in a garage, and just had no-one to talk to. So we have a long talk about Angela.

Camilla finds that the men in the family don’t talk easily. Friends just don’t mention it. I feel the same and it’s a great relief to both of us to break the silence.

At lunchtime to Twickenham – a near-two-hour journey to re-dub one line. Charlie is there, as benignly grumpy as ever … ‘I don’t like
people
very much, you see,’ he confides cheerfully as we go upstairs to the dubbing theatre. He also tells me that the audiences in New York liked me very much, and that’s why he’s had to cut the torture scene!

When I return home I find another cat there. This is Albert, a male tabby – younger than Betty by three or four months. I can’t see much of him as he won’t come out of his basket, from which he blinks at me without moving.

Betty’s first reaction is not reassuring. When not actually hissing at Albert, she growls and hisses at the basket.

Against the background of this delicate relationship, and indeed of their relationship with us and our house, the afternoon passes with occasional glimpses at the paper, lots of phone calls and some Christmas card writing.

Jonathan Ross calls to tell me that the ‘nude chat show’ idea is off for Friday. None of the women would agree to do it, except for Janet Street-Porter.

To the new Waterstone’s in Hampstead. Wonderful. A New York-style bookstore within walking distance of my house!

Hassled by a phone call from the ‘organisers’ of the King’s Cross Disaster Fund photo-call which I’ve agreed to attend, suddenly making it all sound far more elaborate – with carols to sing and Dickensian costumes, etc.

I drive to Chalk Farm. Announcements on the platform of delays due to shortage of staff – if only there were video information screens at station entrances, one could decide on bus, foot or an alternative before being stuck on the platform.

To Leicester Square Theatre at which a selection of notables is assembling.

Most of us have baulked at being asked to wear Dickensian outfits. Carols are sung, we all do ‘Hark the Herald’, then photos are taken, from which peripheral celebrities are ruthlessly excluded – ‘Mr Davenport, could you step out, please!’ ‘Good expressions, now!’ TJ quite amused and thinks this could be a new, instant form of directing. ‘King Lear … look sad … this way please … good!’

Bill Paterson appears, as he often does, from nowhere. He’s late for the call, but no-one knows who he is anyway. We go for a coffee – myself, TJ, Bill, Marcia Warren and Anna Carteret. On the way I’m buttonholed by the Thames TV crew. ‘Michael, could you give us a piece straight from the heart, all right?’

Am collected for the Jonathan Ross
Last Resort
show at seven.

The show is all set up as a beach party and I’m given some long shorts, a loud shirt, sweater and ’50’s sunglasses.

Janet Street-Porter is on the show and doesn’t impress. She evidently rates herself rather highly – arrives at the last minute, cars collect her immediately afterwards – but what really pisses me off is that she eats in her dressing room, then puts the half-eaten, mucky tray-ful of mutilated food out in the corridor. She then pushes it along to my door. ‘I can’t stand having trays outside my dressing room.’

A run-through. I’m to appear on a donkey. Seems to work well. At the end everyone is delighted. ‘If in doubt, get in a Python,’ Jonathan enthuses.

First inkling that the Ross interview might not have been as riotous as it had seemed, comes from Rachel’s very muted response. ‘You were very silly, Dad,’ is about all she will say as we drive into Soho for our Saturday morning swim.

Up the road to a lunchtime drinks party with a new resident. I feel all should be done to keep the reality of the community spirit to which we all pay lip-service. In a very small room full of women (mainly), I meet a paediatrician in Kentish Town – a New Zealand lady, both voluble and opinionated, who writes children’s books and [long-time residents] Miss Clutton and Miss Goodman.

Little old Miss Goodman greets me with ‘How did you like China?’

Impressed that she even knew I was travelling at all, I correct her good-naturedly … ‘Thailand’.

‘The china I gave Mrs Palin.’

Miss Clutton is on excellent form. Wafer-thin and neat to the point of severity, she has great spirit. The extrovert New Zealander talks about what hell it’s been having her house converted and being without a bathroom. Miss Clutton grins cheerfully, ‘I’m
still
waiting for mine.’ This slightly throws the conversation off its middle-class path, bringing it to a total stop when she adds ‘I haven’t had a bath for 75 years.’

Some local shopping – am told to ‘Piss off’ by a grubby shopkeeper with a Mediterranean accent, just because I want to buy one clementine and one lychee for Helen’s stocking. And I was in such a good mood.

Back home, find a
huge
hamper of fruit from George Harrison.

Out to dinner at ZenW3 with Terry G and Maggie, during Terry’s brief break from
Munchausen
. ‘What’s the latest?’ I ask him, adding hastily ‘
briefly
’. ‘Thirty-six million dollars,’ is his reply. He wants to talk about doing a different sort of film, a small, funny film made with people he likes. He’s fed up with being called ‘Maestro’ and having all these sycophantic and highly-paid Italians with incredibly fragile temperaments waiting on his every word. He saw an hour’s footage this afternoon. ‘The money just isn’t on the screen … it’s OK, but no way should that have cost 20 million.’

Because it’s been so long since I last heard it, even his grumbling seems fresh. Maggie is to have another baby. God knows when he had time for that.

Granny sits on the sofa listening to Lord Denning’s
With Great Pleasure
(Denning has a way of sounding exactly as one would expect a wise old lawyer to have spoken 500 years ago). Helen is peeling potatoes and watching
White Christmas
on TV in the kitchen. Tom and Will are ringing friends. Rachel’s piling the presents into bags. We’ve been blessed with a sunny morning.

Round to 100 Albert Street.

Christmas lunch never fails to be jolly and the presents then virtually swamp the upstairs room, leading Edward to mutter that the house is too small. An aircraft hanger would probably be too small to accommodate a Full Gibbins Christmas.

Granny Burd, the oldest of the grannies present, sits erect as ever, and at one point leans over to Catherine B to ask if she knows she has a bit of silver on the side of her nose. As Catherine had her nose pierced about two years ago, this produces some mirth. Granny B thought it was a Christmas decoration.