Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [137]
Later, whilst lying flat out, but sleepless on my bed, the phone rang, and one of the co-authoresses of Terry’s letter gave me a ring. They were downstairs. But this schedule has ruined me in more ways than one, and I mumbled excuses, saying that I was, well … I was no fun at the moment!
Unfortunately TJ had asked his fan to ring back later and therein lies a grand tale. TJ was back in his room at 12.30 (after a Chinese meal we’d had together with Ina Lee Meibach and others at the Hunan Yin) when the phone rang and the persistent Python groupie told TJ she was in the lobby and would like to see him – but couldn’t because ‘they’ wouldn’t let her up to his room. Here TJ, sensing a cause, and especially one against Marriotts, made the wrong move of the evening and went downstairs. True enough, two armed guards stood by the lift and forbad TJ to take this lady up to his room.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall, for TJ, by his own account, went berserk. All the bitterness of the TWA food and the static which afflicted him unmercifully and the noisy air-conditioning, must have poured out at these poor heavily armed men. But they insisted that Terry must pay if they were to let the girl into the room. So they obviously weren’t anti-hookers, they were perpetuating a system whereby hookers were OK if Marriotts got a rake-off. So Terry’s wrath was well-directed and in the end he defied these thugs and got the girl upstairs. It was only then that he discovered that she was a heavy lady of un-outstanding features and by no means a beautiful princess rescued from the jaws of the dragon. The next morning Terry was therefore full of shame, he said, but the story is such a classic that I think it worthy of this full account.
Wednesday, March 12th, Barclay Hotel, Philadelphia
I never imagined, and certainly from hearing the opinions of Americans on the subject, I was never encouraged to imagine, that Philadelphia would be an improvement on New York. In fact it’s like being released from jail. The Amtrak ride from Penn Central in New York is through some of the most dreary, miserable landscape in the world, a vast dumping ground – Manhattan’s colostomy bag – but, in just the four hours we’ve been here, I’ve felt like a bird released from a cage. Now this may have something to do with the fact that my room looks out over the city and is on the twenty-first floor, rather than the dungeon in the Essex House which looked out on brick wall and more brick wall, but, for instance, I just heard a clock chiming – and I haven’t heard that since I left London. There is light and space and air here. But unfortunately there is no time. We have done two newspaper interviews already in our twenty-first-floor suite and are about to go out to dinner … God! How food terrifies me now … I just can’t wait to not see it. And after that there is a radio inter— I can’t go on, I must go and change, my phone is being paged and my door banged on.
Thursday, March 13th, Philadelphia
The morning spent at the Philadelphia PBS TV studios. We recorded some direct, almost sincere, straight-to-camera promos, extolling the thinking man’s channel. Then, from somewhere, they conjured up a rather nervously cheerful lady, who was going to interview us. She looked afraid but, on discovering we were nice lads, loosened up. Typical of the refreshingly disorganised set-up – this ten-minute chat suddenly took off when the director snapped his fingers and cried ‘Hey, if you give me 15 minutes to get another camera, we could make this a 30-minute special!’ And a 30-minute special it became.
Left Philly at 3.45 with fond memories. Arrived in Washington about 5.00. We have a sumptuous suite in the Watergate Complex, overlooking the Potomac. (A dirty river, a lady reporter told me – especially where it flows past the Pentagon, where it is full of used prophylactics.) I go around stuffing