Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [138]
Saturday, March 15th, Dallas
We are driven into, or almost into, Dallas, to an incongruous looking fifteen-storey hotel set in the Oak Lawn area – full of attractive weather-boarded houses. We learnt later that these are the only old houses allowed to survive in this rich and developing city. My room at the Stoneleigh Park Hotel is quite stupendous. The bedroom has views on two sides and an eight-foot-wide, beautifully comfortable bed. A bathroom, generously proportioned, is attached, but the star turn is a long sitting-room – forty feet long at least – furnished in the Empire style, with elegant sofas, chaises longues, and Watteau reproductions on the wall.
Drove down to the PBS station, to find ourselves facing a barrage of microphones and reporters, who sat amongst the scenery and props, barring our way to the studio. I have never seen anything like it. Admittedly, most of the microphones belonged to young fresh-faced lads with cheap Philips cassette recorders and none of the mikes had NBC, ABC or CBS News stuck on the end, but this was the first time any of us have ever experienced this saturation coverage. Every word was recorded or written down, questions fell fast, one on top of the other, as did the answers. It could have been awful, but as it was so spontaneous it was exhilarating.
There are a great many people out here who do want to know all about Monty Python. It’s as genuine, simple and direct as that. And, as a result, the self-consciousness I had always felt about talking about ourselves to English journalists, etc, does not apply here. One can answer directness only with directness.
After the ‘press conference’ we are moved through into the studio, which is packed, mostly with young people, college kids, and one or two 30—40-ish liberals. I am handed a rather fine stuffed armadillo, as a present from Dallas. This I hang on to throughout the interviews.
The next few hours are all handled very informally. We are in chairs on a podium and are chatted to at regular intervals by Ron Devillier,1 programme director of the station. A lovely man, comfortably built, soft-voiced, bearded, about 35-40, with a lack of pretension and a great deal of knowledge and intelligence. Ron asks people, as usual, to ring in with pledges of money and buy membership of Channel 13 for a year. The phones ring behind and an army of volunteers answer them.
Graham establishes on the air that he is a supporter of gay causes – and gets a greater number of appreciative and enquiring calls from viewers than anyone else.
During the course of the evening they played no less than three Python shows. It was an orgy of Python – a total immersion in total enthusiasm, that didn’t end until after 12.00. Thankfully we disengaged ourselves and, with about ten folk from the station, went to a tatty nearby clapboard house for a quite superb Mexican meal.
I still had the armadillo with me when I got back to the hotel room and, later that night, frightened myself with it quite considerably when I went for a pee.
Sunday, March 16th, Navarro Hotel, New York
Ron Devillier picked us up at 12.00 and took us for a drive round Dallas. Devillier, clearly no lover of the downtown area – though he lives in Dallas – shows us the Kennedy Memorial, which it took eight years to put up. He says that now it is hard to imagine how much people in Dallas hated President Kennedy and all he stood for. After his assassination, classes of schoolkids cheered and a teacher who tried to give her class a day off in Kennedy’s memory was fired.
We eventually found ourselves at the scene of the shooting. What struck me most was the eerie ordinariness of the spot. Possibly I’d expected the area to be razed to the ground, but here we were, on a cool March Sunday, standing on the most famous – the only famous – grassy knoll in the world, looking up at the Book Depository windows from which Oswald had fired, and across to the road, narrow by American